John Taylor - 200 years ago.

I have made a fortune in my Birmingham factory. Five hundred people work for me in Union Street, making buckles, buttons, and snuff-boxes. I use my money to buy land in and around Birmingham, and I own nearly as much as there is in the whole of Sheldon manor : but much of my land is not in Sheldon but in Yardley, of which I am lord of the manor. My home used to be Bordesley Hall, but now I live in Moseley Hall. I often ride out to see my farms in Sheldon : my tenants are encouraged to improve their land, and so get better crops, by using lime and marl, and to plant root crops. Farms and cottages are being rebuilt in brick.

I can well afford the expense, and shall get my money back in increased rents as the tenants make more profit. John Snape has been making careful surveys of all my estates, and is now drawing maps of them. A good deal of land is still being wastefully farmed in strips, and I intend to seek agreements with other land-owners to enclose the open fields, dividing them up into compact holdings on which new farms can be built.

Some of these can be big enough to house many families of labourers, people who will lose their very small holdings and have to work for someone else. Orphan children are a problem in every parish, costing the rate-payers a great deal, but I am able to employ many of them in my factory.

Lord Digby is lord of Sheldon, and he has made a deer park of the old West Hall demesne around Kents Moat. He and I, with the few other large land-owners, have to provide carts and men to maintain the roads of Sheldon. All tenants have by law to do some work on the roads every year, but the work is poorly and grudgingly done. Lanes are deeply sunk and rutted, while fords across the brooks are often impassable. There is but one good road in the parish, and that is the Coventry Turnpike : there is a toll-gate by the Wheatsheaf Inn, where payment must be made for use of the highway.

Every year people leave Sheldon, mostly to work in Yardley or Birmingham, because they cannot find work in the parish. If all the land was enclosed, the meadows drained, the roads improved, and the new methods of farming used, there might be work and a good living for everyone. I am doing what I can to make the bare Sheldon landscape more pleasant, as well as more profitable, by hedge and tree planting.