Tudor Times

Three surveys of Birmingham made in 1529, 1542, and 1555, each accompanying a sale of the manor, give us our first written descriptions of Borough and Foreign. Together they provide a fairly detailed picture. There is reference to 'closes' (enclosed pieces) of Lord's Field, Wheat Field, Colborne Fields, and Wyatt Field : these are evidently ancient names of manorial great fields, but in every case the information is given that these are pastures, no longer being cultivated, and no mention is found of surviving common arable. Clearly enclosure of the fields was practically complete. A 'pasture or wood' called 'le Worston' is listed, which can only mean a former wood now largely cleared.

Gib Heath and Hockley are named north and east of the Heath, but these and other names may well be much o1der than any surviving record. Thus Ladywood and Dudley Road first appear in documents in 1565, yet the highway to Dudley was Norman if not Saxon in origin, while a wood from which the income went to support St. Mary's Chapel in church had obviously been named before the Reformation. Metchley Park was bought by Robert Middlemore from the Crown about the time of the first survey, when Edward de Birmingham. had forfeited his properties.

Pasturage of the land 'called Rotton Parke' was let in 1529 to Thos. Gilbert for 100 shillings per annum. However, he served as keeper for the manorial 1ord, being paid 28s.6d, for this work. Three years earlier John Prattie had taken a 40-year lease for 40 shillings p.a. of the rights of grazing, collecting 'windfall wood', and all other profits of the Park except the 'great timber', which was expressly reserved to the lord. A space left in the document for the number of acres in the Park was unfortunately never filled by the clerk to the surveyors : if the bounds were as suggested above, the Park actually covered about 900 acres, of which 250 were in Edgbaston. The survey here refers to a ''great pond' (Roach Pool) which was overgrown with weed and reed, containing few fish : the 'logge' was 'sore decayed' and evidently the keeper no longer lived in it. The common, where free tenants grazed stock without hindrance or payment, was said to be 'about a mile in circuit'. If this term had the modern meaning of a perimeter, it would mean that the common was no more than 40 acres in area : since the common was Birmingham Heath, which we know to have been much larger two centuries later, we may assume that the surveyor was describing a roughly square piece with sides of a mile - which were the dimensions of the Heath at enclosure in 1800.

The last Keeper of the Park was Thos. Hancocks. Centuries of browsing by game and stock, and tree-felling by the lord's men, had created grassy parkland, so that the planting of quickset hedges would soon convert the ancient hunting -ground into a hundred-plus pastoral pieces. Rotton Park and Beaks Farms post-date enclosure : the Lodge was rebuilt. Despite its name, Birmingham Heath Farm, of unknown date, lay in the Park, near the north end of City Road, and there may have been a farm on the site of Summerfield House. There is no information about farms in the east of the former Park.

When John Leland described Birmingham in passing (1536), he referred to the 'iron and sea-cole out of Staffordshire' which supplied the town's forges. The long trains of starved and beaten pack-horses which roused Hutton's anger 250 years later were already picking their way across the Heath in ever-increasing numbers. In 1555 and 1597 were passed the Acts which gave to Civil Parishes or Vestries responsibility for poor relief and highways : Birmingham and Edgbaston had their select Vestrymen thenceforth, chosen from among the chief tenants, who served as unpaid Overseers and levied rates. The civil and ecclesiastical parishes were co-extensive, so that the Birmingham part of our district was still ad-ministered by the Vestry of St. Martin's, and the Edgbaston part by St. Bart's Vestry, until 1852 (Highways) and 1931 (Poor Relief).