Medieval Birmingham: People and Places, 1070-1553

Cover\nTitle Page\nCopyright Page\nContents Page\nContents\nAcknowledgements\nPicture Credits\n	Figure 1: Detail of the Gough Road map, circa 1360. Birmingham was important enough to be shown on the Worcester via Droitwich to Lichfield Road. The modern place-names in black were placed there by the writer.\n	Figure 2: Drift and solid geology of the Bermingham Manor.\n	Figure 3: Contours, drainage and routes in the Manor of Bermingham.\n	Figure 4: Coat-of-arms of the Bermingham family of England. The shield with a dexter bend fuzil, the lozenge at the top on the left and the bottom on the right, is supposed to represent a distaff (a stick or spindle on to which wool or flax is wound for s\n	Figure 5: Family tree of the English lords of Bermingham.\n	Figure 6: A thirteenth century copy of the Bermingham market charter of 1166 and the confirmatory charter of 1189. The original documents are now lost. Reproduced by permission of the National Archives, London, C52/19 (41-42).\n	Figure 7: Map of the estates of Peter de Bermingham in the barony of Dudley, West Midlands.\n	Figure 8: Lands held by the Berminghams in the Home Counties. Hoggeston and Kingston Bagpuize were in the lordship of Dudley, Maidencourt, Shutford, and Braunston were not Dudley property.\n	Figure 9: The coat-of-arms of William de Bermingham VI as displayed in the Charles, 163 and St George’s Rolls, E413 in 1285.\n	Figure 10: Tomb of a Sir William de Bermingham in St Martin’s Church, Birmingham as drawn for William Dugdale’s book.\n	Figure 11: Drawing of a medieval knight displaying the Bermingham family shield in St Martin’s church in John Thackray Bunce’s book. The decorative side of the tomb is different from the Dugdale drawing. It may have been an effigy of either Sir William de\n	Figure 12: Medieval knight effigy in St Martin’s today. Reproduced by permission of Elaine Mitchell.\n	Figure 13: Armour as worn by a Sir William de Bermingham (VII or VIII).\n	Figure 14: Sir Geoffrey Luttrell (1276-1345) being given a helm and a lance by his wife, Lady Luttrell (Agnes de Sutton, the sister of Sir John de Sutton I, Baron Dudley), while his daughter-in-law, Beatrice le Scrope, is about to hand him a shield. The i\n	Figure 15: Coat-of-arms of Sir Henry and Sir Fulk de Bermingham as used at the Battle of Crécy 1358 and the Siege of Calais, based on the Irish coat but using a different colour scheme, Argent (silver) and Sable (black). These arms were later used by Sir\n	Figure 16: Coat-of-arms of the Bermingham family of Ireland, adopted by Sir Fulk. The shield shows a partie per pale shield divided, indented, or (gold) and gules (red). The colours can be found in the de Clare family’s coat. The indents are a version of\n	Figure 17: Tomb of a Sir William and Sir Fulk in St Martin’s Church, Birmingham, as drawn for Sir William Dugdale’s book.\n	Figure 18: Fulk de Bermingham’s tomb in St Martin’s Church, Birmingham today. Reproduced by permission of Elaine Mitchell.\n	Figure 19: Coat of arms of Sir John de Bermingham in the British Museum. The scallops represented pilgrimages and may either relate to Sir John’s grandfather’s journey to Santiago de Compostela in Spain or a pilgrimage he had made himself.\n	Figure 20: Tomb of Sir John de Bermingham in St Martin’s Church, Birmingham, as drawn for William Dugdale’s Book. The Irish Bermingham coat-of-arms can be clearly seen on his torso.\n	Figure 21: Tomb of Sir John de Bermingham as drawn in John Thackray Bunce’s book.\n	Figure 22: Sir John de Bermingham’s alabaster table top tomb in St Martin’s Church, Birmingham, today. Reproduced by permission of Elaine Mitchell.\n	Figure 23: Plate armour of Sir John de Bermingham.\n	Figure 24: Both Sir William IX and Sir William X used the English and Sir Henry’s Irish coats-of-arms.\n	Figure 25: Map of Ireland showing the estates of the Berminghams.\n	Figure 26: Anglo-Irish Bermingham family tree.\n	Figure 27: Leinster and the Bermingham lands.\n	Figure 28: Carbury Castle, home of the Barons of Ardee, the Irish Tethmoy de Bermingham family.\n	Figure 29: Birmingham Tower, Dublin Castle, Dublin, Ireland. Supposedly named after Sir John de Bermingham, Earl of Louth.\n	Figure 30: Connaught and the Bermingham lands.\n	Figure 31: Athenry Castle (now called Moyode Castle), home of the Barons of Athenry, the Irish de Bermingham family. Although the tower house shown here was not built until 1550 the de Bermingham one was very similar. Reproduced by permission of Carl Chin\n	Figure 32: Estates of the Barony of Dudley with the lands and tenants of the Bermingham family from 1280 to 1322.\n	Figure 33: Parles coat-of-arms, blue and gold of Dudley, indented of the Irish Bermingham coat.\n	Figure 34: Coat of arms of the Bushbury family. The broad band and narrower bands on either side called a fess cottised, represent military might. The scallop shells signify that the family had travelled. If a member of the family had visited the shrine o\n	Figure 35: Coat-of-arms of Rushall as used by John Harpur, from the Rushall Psalter, a parchment volume written in the 15th century. Its first owner, John Harpur, pronounced a curse on anyone who removed the book in an ownership poem on f. 20v of the volu\n	Figure 36: The coat of arms of the Enville family was the same as the Barons of Dudley.\n	Figure 37: A fifteenth century misericord (a shelf intended to support a person in a partially standing position during long periods of prayer) in St Mary the Virgin’s Church, Enville, showing a castle with infantry men and horsemen coming out of the gate\n	Figure 38: Stafford family coat of arms.\n	Figure 39: Archery practice at the butts, from a fourteenth century image in the Luttrell Psalter.\n	Figure 40: The eleventh century Welsh war. William de Bermingham I was born while his parents were on active service in Gwynedd.\n	Figure 41: In the civil war between King Stephen and the Empress Matilda. Gervase Paganell, Baron Dudley and Peter de Bermingham fought on the empress’ side.\n	Figure 42: The medieval sea wall of Kyrenia, Cyprus, 2015.\n	Figure 43: The medieval castle of St Hilarion, Cyprus, 2015.\n	Figure 44: Map of Palestine at the time of the Third Crusade. Sir William de Bermingham II fought with King Richard against Saladin.\n	Figure 45: Battle plan of Lewes. Sir Roger de Somery, Baron Dudley, fought with the king; Sir William de Bermingham V was with Simon de Montfort’s forces.\n	Figure 46: Battle plan of Evesham. Sir William de Bermingham V fought on Simon de Montfort’s side and was killed in the battle.\n	Figure 47: Simon de Montfort was supposedly killed by Roger Mortimer and then hacked to pieces by the royalists as depicted in this contemporary drawing. It is not known if William de Bermingham V suffered the same fate.\n	Figure 48: Map of battles in Scotland. William de Bermingham VII was a regular participant in these wars.\n	Figure 49: In the fourteenth century jousting was a popular sport with the knightly class, and with Sir John de Bermingham in particular. By the Master of the Codex Manesse.\n	Figure 50: Battle of Boroughbridge. Sir John de Somery, Baron Dudley and Sir William de Bermingham VIII fought on the king’s side, William de Stafford of Amblecote on Lancaster’s.\n	Figure 51: Battle of Halidon Hill, Berwick-on-Tweed. Walter de Clodeshale of Bermingham fought in this engagement.\n	Figure 52: Map of the Normandy Campaign, 1346-7. The English army included Sir Fulk and Sir Henry de Bermingham with Sir John de Pyrie of Perry, Sir William Bowles of Rushall and Sir Richard Enfeld of Enville among their retinue.\n	Figure 53: Plan of the Battle of Crécy, 1346. Sir Fulk and Sir Henry de Bermingham were with King Edward’s division; Sir John Sutton, Baron Dudley, was in the Earls of Northampton and Arundel’s division.\n	Figure 54: Plan of the Battle of Poitiers. Sir Fulk de Bermingham fought in this battle.\n	Figure 55: Plan of the Battle of Shrewsbury, 1403. It is likely that Sir William Bermingham IX fought in this engagement.\n	Figure 56: Henry V’s conquest of France. Sir William IX of Bermingham and Sir John Harpur fought with the king.\n	Figure 57: Plan of the Battle of Agincourt, 25 October 1415. Sir William de Bermingham IX and Sir John Harpur of Bermingham fought in this battle.\n	Figure 58: The medieval manor of Bermingham.\n	Figure 59: An archaeological excavation in 2000/1 revealed the hyrsonedych. The ditch was seven meters wide and two meters deep. The brick wall above the feature displays how ancient boundaries have survived until recently. Reproduced by permission of Mic\n	Figure 60: A pillow-mound in a warren, shown in the fourteenth century Luttrell Psalter. Coneys (rabbits) were a source of fur and meat to the people who kept them.\n	Figure 61: The site of the moated manor house in Westley’s map of 1731. Reproduced by permission of the Library of Birmingham.\n	Figure 62: The environs of St Thomas’ Priory with a conjectural priory complex.\n	Figure 63: A reconstruction by Faith Vardy of the priory and hospital at St Mary, Spitalfields, London. Perhaps a similar building complex existed in Bermingham.  Reproduced by permission of the Museum of London Archaeology.\n	Figure 64: General ground plan of a medieval priory and hospital.\n	Figure 65: Apparel of an Augustine Canon as depicted by Dugdale.\n	Figure 66: Property of the Free Chapel of St Thomas’ Priory. We do not have evidence for where the individual properties were situated\n	Figure 67: Parsonage complex\n	Figure 68: Friars invited to Sir Geoffrey Luttrell’s dining table, from the fourteenth century Luttrell Psalter.\n	Figure 69: St Martin’s Parish Church, from Westley’s map of 1731. It was rebuilt in 1690, 1781 and 1873. Reproduced by permission of the Library of Birmingham.\n	Figure 70: Plan of St Martin’s church prior to the post-medieval changes.\n	Figure 71: Medieval phase plan of St Martin’s church.\n	Figure 72: Longitudinal section showing the crypt under the west side and the chamber underneath the east, from John Thackray Bunce’s book.\n	Figure 73: Blocked window aperture with trefoiled-head, from John Thackray Bunce’s book.\n	Figure 74: Medieval clerestory window, possibly dating to 1375-1400, as revealed in the nineteenth century by the removal of the eighteenth- century plaster coating in old St Martin’s Church.\n	Figure 75: Medieval column capital as revealed in the nineteenth century in St Martin’s Church. The Gothic form is very simple in comparison to many churches.\n	Figure 76: Medieval stonework as revealed in the nineteenth century in St Martin’s Church. The trefoil-headed arches look as if they formed part of a blind arcade, perhaps used in the chancel area.\n	Figure 77: A copy of the medieval wall painting as seen in the south corner of the chancel of St Martin’s church. The upper register shows St Martin cutting his cloak with a sword and giving it to a beggar. The lower image shows woodsmen at work. The piec\n	Figure 78: Coats-of-arms, as recorded by Dugdale, formerly in St Martin’s Church.\n	Figure 79: Tomb of a fourteenth century canon in St Martin’s Church, Birmingham, as drawn for Sir William Dugdale’s Book.\n	Figure 80: Tomb of the canon in St Martin’s Church, Birmingham, as drawn for John Thackray Bunce.\n	Figure 81: Tomb of the canon in St Martin’s Church today, possibly Richard de Bermingham. Reproduced by permission of Elaine Mitchell.\n	Figure 82: The Sherbrooke Missal, one of the earliest surviving Mass books of English origin. The theme on this page is baptism with musical notation. Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Wales.\n	Figure 83: A drawing of the Common Seal of the Guild of the Holy Cross, Bermingham.\n	Figure 84: Coats of arms in the north aisle window of St Martin’s Church, as shown in Sir William Dugdale’s book.\n	Figure 85: The property of the Holy Cross Guild in Bermingham. This displays owners, not necessarily occupiers of the property. Only a few actual sites of the property owners are known.\n	Figure 86: St John’s Chapel at Deritend in Joseph Toulmin Smith’s book. This engraving was made prior to 1735 when a new building replaced the original one.\n	Figure 87: Sir John Sutton VI, Baron Dudley, is dressed in ermine with coats of arms surrounded by the Order of the Garter as shown in a window of St John’s Chapel in Sir William Dugdale’s book. The impaling of the Dudley coat-of-arms with Berkeley occurr\n	Figure 88: The precise position of the property of St Johns’, Deritend is presently unknown, but ownership of lands in the streets of Deritend and Bermingham is understood.\n	Figure 89: Even as late as the eighteenth-century Deritend was small. This map, dated to 1750, shows the River Rea, Heath Mill Lane and the Chapel of St Johns with the main street called Deritend.\n	Figure 90: The Old Leather Bottle, Deritend shown in an engraving of 1629 in Joseph Toulmin Smith’s book. It can be seen by the raised road in front of it that the structure is very ancient.\n	Figure 91: The layout of the townscape of Bermingham.\n	Figure 92: A reconstruction of the medieval marketplace of Bermingham by Martyn Cole.\n	Figure 93: A fight taking place during a drinking session, from the fourteenth century Luttrell Psalter.\n	Figure 94: Residents of Bermingham in 1296 and 1344-5 whose surnames suggest an origin from other estates in England.\n	Figure 95: Ploughing from a fourteen-century image in the Luttrell Psalter.\n	Figure 96: Sowing, from a fourteenth century image in the Luttrell Psalter.\n	Figure 97: Harvesting, from a fourteenth century image in the Luttrell Psalter.\n	Figure 98: Threshing, from a fourteenth century image in the Luttrell Psalter.\n	Figure 99: Women milking sheep, from the fourteenth century Luttrell Psalter. Reproduced by permission of the British Library Board, Add. 42130. f.163v, c13382-18.\n	Figure 100: Collecting timber from a wood, from an illustration in the British Library.\n	Figure 101: Hunting in a wood, from Le Livre de chasse de Gaston Phébus.\n	Figure 102: Archaeological excavations in Birmingham.\n	Figure 103: Archaeological watching brief on Birmingham Moat. The wider area of the south part of the moat resulted from the main flow of the brook running in that direction.\n	Figure 104: Archaeological plan of Structure One.\n	Figure 105: Archaeological section drawing of south facing façade of the wall.\n	Figure 106: East facing wall of the feature, with the earlier wall behind it, on the medieval manor house site, photographed by Lorna Watts in 1973-5 during the construction of the Wholesale Market.\n	Figure 107: Section of Structure two (drawing of the side of the pit) showing the stakes and the silting up that took place. The silting material above had all been contaminated by post-medieval finds. The upper parts of the mudstone contour had been redu\n	Figure 108: Archaeological excavations at Edgbaston Street.\n	Figure 109: Area A, Edgbaston Street under excavation.\n	Figure 110: Whetstones used for sharpening knives in the tanning process.\n	Figure 111: Area A, Edgbaston Street – tiled oven base.\n	Figure 112: Area A, Edgbaston Street under excavation. A Deritend cooking pot that had been well used.\n	Figure 113: Moor Street Excavation.\n	Figure 114: Area A, Moor Street, section of hyrsonedych.\n	Figure 115: Area A, Moor Street, Medieval Well.\n	Figure 116: Park Street: location of excavation.\n	Figure 117: Park Street Areas A and B\n	Figure 118: Park Street, Area C\n	Figure 119: Park Street, Area C, female burial. Did she die of plague or was she murdered?\n	Figure 120: Park Street, Area C, kiln\n	Figure 121: Allison Street – Digbeth excavation location sites.\n	Figure 122: Window tracery from Allison Street-Digbeth site with two cusps, evidence of white wash in one of the cusps. Reproduced by permission of University of Leicester Archaeology Service.\n	Figure 123: Floodgate Street showing areas of archaeological excavation.\n	Figure 124: Floodgate Street showing excavated medieval features.\n	Figure 125: The later prospect of Bermingham in 1656 with Deritend chapel in the foreground as shown in an engraving in William Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warwickshire. This scene is likely to be a similar depiction to that of the town in the medieval perio\n	Figure 126: Seal of the Borough of Birmingham, 1838.\n	Figure 127: The present-day coat of arms of the Metropolitan Borough of Birmingham. The Bermingham family’s coat-of-arms is still with us, although various other devices have been added: a helmet, an ermine fess across the centre (the arms of the Calthorp\n	Figure 128: Modern townscape of the Manor of Birmingham\nPreface\nIntroduction\n	Part One Bermingham and its Lords\n	Chapter One\nIn the beginning…\n	Chapter Two\nThe lords of Bermingham in England and Ireland\n	Chapter Three\nThe medieval estates of the de Bermingham family\n	Chapter Four\nThe fighting men of Bermingham\n	Part TwoThe manor and church of Bermingham\n	Chapter Five\nThe medieval manor of Bermingham\n	Chapter Six\nThe Priory and Hospital of St Thomas the Martyr\n	Chapter Seven\nSt Martin’s Church\n	Part ThreeLife in the town and country\n	Chapter Eight\nLife in the town\n	Chapter Nine\nWork and Trades in Bermingham\n	Chapter Ten\nHigh days and low days\nConclusion\nBibliography