Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

Sometimes people needed a loan long before there were banks ready to advance money. In those pre-banking days you could usually find a neighbour willing to lend, and the loan would be recorded at the local court. The minor court at Sutton was held...

William Rooker of Maney had a joined bedstead with a feather mattress on top of a chaff mattress, a bolster, a red rug and two blankets. The bed was a four-poster, with a canopy and red curtains, and after his death in 1673 the bed was valued at &...

Before 1824 the whole area now known as Boldmere was a featureless expanse of gorse, heather and grass, common land where countless sheep grazed. When Sutton commons were enclosed in 1825 and the land was parcelled out to private owners it was bad...

Although John James was only an agricultural labourer, by the time he was 40 years old he had been able to buy a piece of land and build himself a cottage. The 1861 census gives John James, 48, his wife Mary, 43 and daughter Celia, a 22-year-old d...

Four Oaks Hall was demolished in 1895. It had been built by Simon Luttrell early in the eighteenth century, and he had secured an Act of Parliament enabling him to add 46 acres of Sutton Park to his Four Oaks Park, and a later owner, Sir William H...

The first brick building in Sutton was Moor Hall, built in the 1520s for Bishop Vesey. Brick was a very high-status building material at the time, and expensive. Elsewhere in Sutton it was widely used over the next hundred years for chimneys - pre...

The first road atlas of England was published in 1675. It was called The Travellers Guide by John Ogilby, and showed the main trunk roads in a series of strip maps. The only one of Ogilby’s trunk roads to pass through Sutton Coldfield in 167...

If you stand on the Vesey Memorial looking across Vesey Gardens to High Street, you see a wide triangle of space enclosed by Mill Street and Coleshill Street. If you were standing here 800 years ago, you would be looking at the Earl of Warwick’s n...

When the Sutton Town Council decided to celebrate the coronation of King George V in 1911, a splendid programme of festivities was planned. On Coronation Day, Thursday 22nd June, a commemoration service in the parish church was followed by a proce...

The Manor of Sutton Coldfield belonged to the Earls of Warwick in the Middle Ages. The manor, in common with all the other manors belonging to the earl, was managed by the earl’s officials, headed by his Receiver General, with the objective ...

Speculators burned their fingers. The London and North Western Railway opened its Sutton Coldfield Branch in 1862. This five-mile-long railway from Aston to Sutton was first promoted by a group of local businessmen - they made a good profit when ...

The old town of Sutton Coldfield ceased to exist in 1883, and the Borough of Sutton Coldfield was established in its place when the new Charter was received from Queen Victoria in April 1886. The new corporation had more responsibilities than the ...

John Sutherland Valentine had a successful business as a chapman and dealer in the Ashted area of Birmingham. In 1826 he bought a plot of land on the Sutton commons - at the time parts of the commons were being auctioned to help pay for the costs ...

For most of Sutton’s history the main recreation of the upper classes was hunting. The common people also enjoyed catching wild creatures for the pot and poaching, but there were other diversions as well. Not all these pastimes were innocent...

When the Earl of Warwick became Lord of the Manor of Sutton in 1126 he was allowed to have his own court there where he could try minor cases including infangthief (Sutton thieves) and outfangthief (outsiders). Most of the business of the courts w...

Canwell Priory had been a small religious house until it was abolished in 1524, when the property came into the possession of Bishop Vesey. Between Bishop Vesey’s mansion at Moor Hall (built c.1525) and his estate at Canwell lay the London t...

Woodland was carefully managed in the Middle Ages, when woodland products were in great demand. Different tree species were grown for specific uses, and while our native holly was not a timber tree, it used to be encouraged because its foliage was...

Claudius, the Emperor of Rome, ordered his army to invade Britain in the year AD43. Four years later, most of England was pacified, and the network of Roman roads was in place, built for military and official use. As the empire expanded northwards...

Bishop Vesey intended that his native town of Sutton Coldfield should thrive. On his travels throughout England, he saw that the cloth trade was the most profitable industry in the 1520s, and accordingly he set about establishing weaving in Sutton...

A controversial decision faced the Warden and Society of Sutton Coldfield in the 1780s - “to whom of the neighbouring masters of hounds the privilege of drawing the park coverts should be conceded”. Some members of the Warden and Socie...

Every five years, from the seventeenth century onwards, the Warden and Society of Sutton Coldfield set out the lot acres and restated the conditions which applied to them. Every householder in Sutton was entitled to an acre of common land, to cult...

At the Railway Enquiry of 1859, the merits of two possible terminus stations in Sutton were considered, the site of one of them being near Lower Parade. A witness, Dr. Oates, said “a great accumulation of moisture arises in that valley - it ...

The Royal Town of Sutton Coldfield was governed by the Warden and Society, a body of twenty-five men equivalent to a Mayor and Corporation. Their rule came under the scrutiny of the Court of Chancery, and the court issued an order in 1824 setting ...

Mere Green five hundred years ago was a triangle of waste ground surrounded by farmland. The poor drainage meant that the Green was unsuitable for farming, and there was a large pool, called Mare Pool, in the centre of it. The main Lichfield Road ...

In the Middle Ages all the corn grown in Sutton had to be taken to the Manor Mills at the bottom of Mill Street to be ground into flour. This milling monopoly continued after Sutton became an independent town in 1528, but by the 1570s change was o...

In 1778 three of the biggest local landowners, Mr. Hackett of Moxhull, Sir Joseph Scott of Great Barr, and Mr Richard Bisse Riland, Rector of Sutton Coldfield, drew up a plan to enclose the commons of Sutton Coldfield. Sutton had very extensive co...

Railway mania raged in England in the 1840s, with hundreds of new lines of railway being proposed. Many of the great pioneer railway engineers were called on to survey the country and determine the best routes. One of them, John R. McLean, was app...

“He does not account for the pannage of the Duchess of Buckingham’s pigs in the King’s park at Eachelhurst this year” - so wrote John Bailly, the Bailiff of Sutton Coldfield, in his accounts for the year 1480. In that year ...

Local historian Norman Evans worked on a series of historical maps of Sutton Coldfield, based on informed guesswork. In drawing up his map of Sutton in Saxon times, he had to decide which trackways may have been in use then, when Birmingham was a ...

Britain was part of the Roman Empire for over 300 years, a period when every acre of land had to be exploited in order to support the 50,000-strong army and 50,000-strong civil service required to run the country, as well as sending taxes to Rome....

At 23 to 29 Penns Lane there was a curious building, known as the Round House - it was demolished in 1970. The Round House was built in the 1840s, on land owned by Stanley’s Charity, when the surrounding area was still open country. In plan ...

Warwickshire County Council was the education authority for Sutton Coldfield in the 1890s. In 1891 the County encouraged Sutton town council (to which most of the local management of education was delegated) to set up a Technical Education committ...

Set in the attractive Bodington Gardens on Birmingham Road, The Smithy is one of Sutton’s oldest buildings. It now houses the Driffold Gallery, and was the Borough Museum of Sutton Coldfield until 1974. The small museum opened in 1962, and i...

Ralph Sponer lived at the stone house known as Moor Hall Farm in 1550. This house, in Moor Hall Drive, is traditionally supposed to be the birthplace of Bishop Vesey, who built his mansion of Moor Hall nearby in 1525. The 1525 Moor Hall was built ...

Bishop Vesey spent a fortune on improvements to Sutton Coldfield, including paving the streets of the town at a cost of £40.3s.8d. The streets paved were High Street, Coleshill Street and Mill Street, the weekly market being held at the junction o...

There were over 100 cottages in Sutton in the eighteenth century, most of them being home to farm workers, but there were also a number of craftsmen living in there. Weaving was a traditional cottage industry before the Industrial Revolution, and ...

“The Rectory of Sutton is worth a clear £400 per annum” - so wrote “Agricola” in “A History of Sutton Coldfield by an Impartial Hand” in 1762. This annual income came mostly from the tithes which the Recto...

Travel on the roads in the nineteenth century was not free - every so often you would come to a toll gate and have to pay a fee to go through. There was a toll gate in Sutton, in Lichfield Road next to the junction with Tamworth Road. The toll hou...

Preserved in the Lichfield Diocesan Record Office is the will of Thomas Patterton, who died in 1690. He was a yeoman living in Walmley, and the will mentions a room in his house which was “next the street”. This street is now Walmley Ash Lane - Wa...

For sixty years after the Norman Conquest Sutton Coldfield was a royal manor. During this time the King’s men improved the Manor House, giving it a curtain wall of stone and a chapel dedicated to St. Blaize, and adding the deer park which is...