THE 'MANOR OF GREET'

The implication of the two names in the sale is that Yardley and Greet were regarded as separate, and possibly the latter had, like Hay Hall nearby, some semi-independent status. As a church property, in different ownership from Yardley which was a possession of the Abbey of St. Mary at Pershore, it doubtless claimed such rights. Greet was certainly a communal settlement with its own open field system.

The Lay Subsidy Rolls of 1280 listed four taxpayers 'de Greet' - Adam, Jordan, Ranulph, and Henry - who were presumably the richest of the tenants.

The great fields which they and others farmed in furlong strips were Heyne (High) Field west of Stratford Road, Gravel Field east of it, and Berry Field north of Warwick Road.

Adam and Reginald Spark, perhaps living at the edge of the common pasture, Spark Green; William and Robert de Greethurst, south of Showell Green, and Henry de Tisseleye (Tyseley) were contemporaries of the Greet tenants.

In addition to the fields and the greens, there were the water-meadows, which Greet had in abundance.

Where the Greeters lived is hard to discover. The known but now vanished hamlet near the 'manor house' (about the modern Greet Inn) may have been a later development. It would have been odd for farmers to live on the far side of a river subject to fierce and sudden floods from their fields and stock, even though the ford may have been an easy one at other times.

It is likely that when the great fields were under cultivation, tenants lived at their edges with no nucleated settlement; this seems to have been so elsewhere in the manor, at Yardley itself and at Tenchley (Acocks Green / Stockfield).

When later the fields were subject to piece-meal enclosure by exchange and purchase, farmers would acquire land about their dwellings, so that in time Greet would look like an area that had been settled individually rather than communally.

Unfortunately such peripheral farm sites are few about The Hill; Greet Farm, Sparkhill and Shrubbery Farms, and perhaps a farm near the 'Mermaid', are the only ones likely to be ancient.

Greet was described as 'manerium de Grete' in 1547, and 'manerium vocatum la Gritte' in 1563. In Humphrey Greswold's will seven years later it was 'the manner of Greet'. He was a local magnate, lay Rector of Yardley, who had acquired the Studley Priory Estates among others; if Greet manor house was his home, it must have been a rebuilding of the Prior's steward's building - probably the original moated site was abandoned as at Blakesley and Moseley, the new house being built beside it.

Until the Dissolution the land surrounding The Hill was owned by Maxstoke and Studley Priories; the Grevises of Moseley Hall, later to be lords of Yardley, and the Greswolds were the acquisitors.

By 1570 those estates were wholly enclosed for pasture, and this was probably the case with Greet Fields. Eight years later Greethurst, a Holte property, was sold to Richard Grevis; it was used thereafter as a private hunting preserve.