OWNERS OF YARDLEY

Yardley was still nominally a possession of Pershore Abbey until the early C 15th, though its tenants had long since given up paying the equivalent of the cost of a mounted man-at-arms as rent. For three hundred years the Beauchamp family held the manor, but having a score of others they rarely or never lived in it, the estate being run by a bailiff.

Several generations of the Limesi family were sub-tenants and probably the only lords ever to be resident. Soon after their line died out, about 1260, several claimants to the manorial rights were all rejected by William de Beauchamp : it was he who by marriage gained the Earldom of Warwick for his family. From the early C 14th until 1478 Yardley was held directly by successive Earls (except when Richard II granted it to the Dukes of Norfolk and Surrey in turn, 1396-9).

Beauchamps were followed by Nevilles including the all-powerful 'Kingmaker' and by George Duke of Clarence. After his execution the Warwick estates including Yardley reverted to the Crown. Plantagenets, Tudors, and Stuarts - eight monarchs in all - were successive lords of the manor. Yardley was one of the properties granted to Catherine of Aragon in her divorce settlement : a poignant reminder of her first marriage to Prince Arthur is the north door of St. Edburgha's Church (see below). After her death Yardley reverted to Henry VIII.

Though Yardley cannot compete with Kings Norton in length of royal ownership, it was a Crown property for 138 years - until Sir Richard Grevis of Moseley Hall bough it in 1629. Not all of Yardley was included in the sale : the 'manor' of Greet was owned by the Greswolds, and other estates were in different hands. After the eminence of Sir Richard, who held high offices under James I, the Grevises were divided in the Civil War, and their
fortunes began a long decline.

When Henshaw Grevis, last of his line, succeeded in 1759, the sale of the estate barely sufficed to pay his father's debts, and he was reduced to labouring. Seven years later the lordship of Yardley and a thousand acres were bought by John Taylor of Bordesley Hall, a very wealthy manufacturer and co-founder of what is now Lloyds' Bank. Most of the Taylor estates were in the southern Quarters of the manor, and the greater part of them was sold in and after 1913 for housing estates and parks.

As the purchaser of much of the land, the City Corporation might be thought of as the present lord of Yardley, but the title (which is a saleable commodity independent of land possession) was never sold and its present holder is Jonathan Taylor or Lower Quinton near Stratford. All manorial rights, vestigial as they were, came to an abrupt end in 1940, so that the title is purely honorary.