THE FOUNDATION OF YARDLEY

The long occupation of Britain by the Roman Empire probably affected Arden very little : no known Roman road crosses Yardley. Doubtless the ridgeway (see below) was in occasional use, but how much, by which peoples, and where they lived, and to what extent the forest had been cleared before the first known settlers arrived, are matters for conjecture.

During the C 7th Hwiccans, descendants of West Saxon invaders, moved north into our area along ancient tracks and crumbling Roman roads. A small group came down beside the marshes of Cole, along a dry ridgeway that is still in use - as Highfield / Fox Hollies Roads, Broad Road, Fox Green, Dalston, Yardley and Church Roads. They may have been former residents of Beoley, which had Yardley as a 'member' in the Domesday Book : but the linking of these two most distant properties of Pershore Abbey may have had no more significance than that the 'radman' of Beoley also collected the taxes of Yardley.

North of a crossing track that descended to a ford the Hwiccans found a densely wooded tract. Whether this deterred them for a short time we cannot guess, but perhaps a game trail provided a way onward.

A mile north they came out on to the open sandy ridge-end. The Cole wound below, on two sides were boggy streams. Forest to east and south completed natural boundaries.

Here was a suitable site for a settlement, high and dry, already cleared or easily clearable. Springs at the drift edges provided ample water, the brooks could be dammed for fish and stock-ponds, the air and heath and forest supplied food and materials in plenty. Stich Brook bisected the high ground : its meadows were drier and often more usable than the wide expanses of bog beside the Cole.

The first open fields to be ploughed and fenced against animals overlay the ridge-end, and the farmers made their separate homesteads at its edges. There was no village.

This account of the initial settlement of north Yardley is conjectural but not without justification. The ridgeway would be the only feasible access route. The slopes were densely wooded and the riverside much too wet for travel.

That the colonists did advance beyond the formidable barrier of Church End's forest and lay claim to north Yardley and later to another drift patch beyond the woods to the east, Lea Village, is certain : if they had not done so ours would not have been a Hwiccan colony but Anglian.

At the same time as Saxons were entering the Plateau from south and east, Anglian immigrants were advancing from north and west : the latter were to establish Birmingham and Aston (which included the later Bordesley and the Bromwiches) and Maccaton (Mackadown, Sheldon's predecessor) as Yardley's neighbours.

They would have settled Yardley too if Hwiccans had not claimed it first. The Cole provided a convenient and indisputable boundary between two not dissimilar peoples, two kingdoms Mercia and Hwiccia (Wigornia) and two shires and bishoprics.

That settlement was peripheral about the fields is equally certain.

Farm-sites once founded for good reasons of geology and water supply, tend to remain in use for centuries. Some of ours may like Mackadown Farm in Sheldon have been in occupation since Bronze Age times.

Finding no justification for the early establishment of Yardley Village, or indeed any nucleated hamlet : and noting that ancient dwellings like Field House, Flaxleys, Hill House, Yardley Farm, Church Road Farm, Cocks, and Blakesley Hall, surround the open fields, we can be fairly confident that these are original sites going back at least twelve centuries.

It is currently being claimed that the strip system of agriculture in great fields is not the natural outcome of successive years of clearance and sharing of each new piece, but is a later development. If so, a scatter of farms bout the fields, each cultivating a compact patch of cleared land close to the house would be the logical arrangement.