TUDOR AND STUART TIMES

Although there were large estates in church hands elsewhere in Yardley until the Reformation, and the church was owned by Maxstoke Priory, there was only one small estates in Church Road (bounded by Cole, Coventry Road, Holders and Hobmoor Roads) and that belonged to Studley Priory. The Earls of Stafford owned Lea Hall in the C 15th. That was later the home of the Dods.

A Perambulation Report of 1495 has come to light. It shows how much of the border lay along 'ditches' on the east side. These could be either natural brooks of man-made trenches. See 'Boundaries of Yardley' by J. M. J. for the detail of that report, of another of 1609, and a comparison of the given bounds across a thousand years. The meandering border with Sheldon Park was straightened in 1710.

The first bell of the Church's peal was installed in 1541. Later the school had a bell hung in the west gable. Acts of 1555 and '98 gave to Civil Parishes the duties of maintaining highways and succouring the poor : annually appointed Overseers were answerable to a Bench of Justices.

Manorial officials continued to serve, notably the Constable and his assistants the Headboroughs, one or more for each Quarter. Conveniently near the school were the combined stocks and whipping post (the former last used in 1852), and alongside a small stone lock-up held prisoners awaiting the Assizes at Worcester.

It is probable that most of the Quarter except the great fields was enclosed by the end of this period. Kitts and Marlpit Greens west of Lea Hall, and Fast Green (junction of Holder, Deakins, and Fast Pits Roads) were small common pastures, but elsewhere hedges and ditches separated conveniently small closes, most of which belonged to a few large farms.

Even the open fields had been nibbled at their edges. Much of the land was given to sheep and cattle, as were the fields after harvest, and the arable was changing to market gardening. Birmingham was increasingly the market for Yardley produce, and it was thither that surplus population moved. Husbandry required fewer workers than did agriculture.

Rural crafts served local needs. Ten kilns were at work in the period, five of them in Church End. Some at least of the houses there began as tile-makers' huts. Because clay (calling it 'marl' was incorrect) was rightly reckoned to be more fertile than drift, it was dug out and spread on fields used for crops.

These marlpits and others beside the kilns soon filled with water and served as fishponds and stock-watering places. There were scores of them eventually. Fast Pits and Pool Lane are reminders.

Blakesley was probably not the only prosperous Yardleian's house to be replaced by a larger and more comfortable one. Its stable block, timber-framed, and its brick kitchens were added in Stuart times : the former was encased in brick a century later.

Yardley first appears in a published map in 1576.

Christopher Saxton's shows church and village at the Coleside near Stichford, and gives it a boundary that annexes a good part of Bordesley and Little Bromwich. No other detail is shown except for a cluster of trees to indicate forest about the borders of Yardley, Solihull, and Kings Norton.

It was probably this remnant of the primeval forest which caused the secretary to the Bishop of Worcester, accompanying His Grace on a tour that included Yardley, to describe the parish as being 'secluded in a great wood'. Yardley Woods, first so named in the 1495 Report, could evidently bear that name without confusion despite being in the extreme south of the manor : the Church End woods were already so reduced as to have lost the name if ever they held it. John Speed's maps of 1610 repeat Saxton's errors, and we must wait three centuries longer before finding an accurate and detailed map of Yardley.

There is no evidence that any of the manor's royal owners ever visited it, nor that any Civil War engagement occurred within its borders. But there was dissent here, Dod of Lea Hall and Est of Hay Hall having a recorded altercation, and we may guess that parishioners were called on to billet troops of both sides and probably pay levies to both as well. Worcestershire was nominally for the King, and Warwickshire for Parliament, so that this was a front line zone.

The three highways across Yardley led from the swelling town of Birmingham to the walled cities of Coventry and Warwick and the river port of Stratford. Traffic along them in peace and war must have been considerable.

Local people were required by law to work on the roads for six statutory days each year : they greatly resented having to repair roads worn by travellers across the manor who brought no profit to the area. Indeed the highways brought looting troops, poachers, footpads, and robbers to add misery to the uncertainties of rural life.

In 1660 there is the first reference to 'the long causeway' by which the deep-sunk church way (Church Road from the Swan) was raised above the mire. It is recalled today in the late Victorian 'Causeway' cul-de-sac which leads off it. Ogilby's strip-map of 1675 records 'Hemill' (Hay Mill) Bridge : as the map was drawn for long-distance travellers by horse or coach, we may assume that the bridge was wide and strong enough for wheeled traffic.

The first known 'Swan' inn was Stuart in date, as were inns at Stechford and Lea Hall, and the 'Ring o'Bells' in the village (Institute site), probably Hay Mill Tavern. There were smithies in each hamlet and on the highways. The Limesi moat site was abandoned in about 1700, when the Allestreys moved to Witton, and no trace of the buildings upon it survive. The lowness of the platform argues against five centuries of continuous occupation, as its level was usually raised at each rebuilding, in part by burying material from earlier structures, in order to make the site dryer.