THE MANOR OF YARDLEY
| Sparkhill and Greet's parent manor is dealt with fully elsewhere.
The distance here from of Yardley village is such - three miles -
that our district's connection with it is a matter for wonder, especially
when the smallness of the early population is known.
Whether originally so or not, by the C 10th the manor of Yardley covered 11.5 square miles, from Castle Bromwich to Solihull Lodge, and from Spark Brook to Olton. Hereabout the boundary was established along Cole and Spark; to the north was Bordesley once part of Aston, and westward was Moseley in the even larger manor of (Kings) Norton. The common bounds must have been fixed by negotiation; watercourses were used whenever convenient, and elsewhere the bounds were usually roughly straight lines marked by blazed trees, banks and ditches. Fences were not erected, because it was the custom in Arden for stock to be allowed to graze freely across borders as long as they were not driven. There were few tracks to provide recognisable limits, though the 'perambulation tracks' of later bounds-beating often became lanes if they went where there was need to go. Yardley's west-bounding tracks were examples of these. |
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