Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

The late eighteenth century was a time of improvement; in 1778 some local landowners put forward a scheme for enclosing the Sutton commons. The commons extended over nearly 4000 acres of Sutton were open common land and the scheme also included th...

The unlicensed processing of animal skins was not allowed in medieval Sutton. Heavy fines were imposed by the Court Leet in 1549 - William Harman had cured or tanned two stomach linings of sheep to make parchment; John Hargreve and Ralph Gybbons, ...

King Henry VIII commissioned the scholar John Leland to examine the libraries of all the religious houses in England, and to study in them. This was in 1533 and Leland spent the next few years travelling, going to various monasteries and priories,...

“Peace!!” wrote Sarah Holbeche under the heading June 14th 1814 in her diary, “Great rejoicings, ox roasted at Ley Hill (then all open common), bread let down in heaps from carts, my first parasol, alas! Proving how heavy the storm by its green dy...

Riding north out of Sutton in 1850, a traveller along Lichfield Road would come first to the “Top of Sutton” at the Tamworth Road junction; from there it would be the district of “Doe Bank” as far as the junction with Four Oaks Road; beyond Doe Ba...

Sutton Coldfield Rectors of medieval times lived in a huge rambling timber-framed building of twenty-two bays, situated in what is now Rectory Park. This ancient Rectory House was not to the taste of the incumbent in 1701; he had a fine new buildi...

The authorities in Elizabethan England in the 1560s were concerned about the number of displaced people and vagrants as the population grew rapidly. One vagrant who had been at the fair at Sutton Coldfield and managed to avoid the constable set of...

Not much remains of the old Little Sutton today - there are the relics of the old village green along Little Sutton Road at the corners of Grange Lane and Marlpit Lane, and the names of some of the roads and pubs are reminders of the past.Although...

A document of 1569 gives the impression that Little Sutton was then a community of about eighteen subsistence farmers and one or two yeomen, living in houses clustered along the village green, which stretched along Little Sutton Road from the Fox ...