But Came They All to Birmingham
Introduction – The Development of Birmingham and the Black Country before 1770
The first 500,000 years
The plateau on which Birmingham and the Black Country stands today is part of the central plateau of the Midlands that bestrides the watershed that is the backbone of England. To the south and west the rains and water-tables become the Rivers Arrow, Alne, Hockley Brook and the Worcestershire river Stour. These in turn flow into the Avon and Severn before passing out into the Bristol Channel and the Atlantic Ocean. Meanwhile to the North and East the waters of the rivers Rea, Blythe, and Cole descend to the River Tame which flows into the Trent and out to the North Sea. (The River Mersey watershed across which the waters head for the Irish Sea crosses just north of Wolverhampton).
I like to think that today’s Birmingham and the Black Country, like Rome, is built on seven hills that rise to between 700ft and 1000ft above sea-level along this part of the ‘Spine of England’. Perhaps the lack of true grandeur and height of these hills means that for thousands of years they were considered to be really just parts of the countryside and scrubland lying between Warwick, Worcester and Stafford. Yet in this line of hills are included Sedgley Beacon (778ft), Turners Hill (889ft), Rednal Hill (879ft), Wychbury Hill (735ft), Frankley Beeches (840ft), Waseley Hill (998ft) and Lickey Beacon (975ft). Walking these peaks is an education.
Evidence of human activity on the plateau is found from the earliest of times with the discovery of the Saltley Handaxe, over 500,000 years old, and across the region similar aged hand-axes have been found in what is now Edgbaston and Erdington. A small 10,000 year-old settlement has been identified at Deritend next to the crossing over the River Rea. The oldest surviving man-made constructions in the City are the 3000 – 4,000 year old Neolithic Barrow at Kingstanding and a possible Cursus (ditch) at Mere Green. Bronze Age farmsteads (3000 – 1200 BCE) and subsequently those from the Iron Age have been identified in Sutton Coldfield, and an Iron Age Hill Fort was at Berry Mound near Major’s Green, with another at Wychbury near Stourbridge. Evidence of a small but widespread population is shown by the existence of forty to fifty ‘Burnt-Mounds’ dating back to 1000BCE being found across the area.
The Romans built Metchley Fort in CE43 where today the Queen Elizabeth Hospital now stands in Edgbaston. Roman kilns have been found at Kings Norton and Mere Green and there were Roman settlements at Castle Bromwich and Grimstock Hill near Coleshill, and perhaps at Witton where the River Tame had a crossing at Perry Barr. Roman roads criss-cross the wider region.
Many of the names that now make up the suburbs of the modern area – Wolverhampton, Bilston and Wednesfield, Kings Norton, Rednal, Duddeston and Yardley – are mentioned in Anglo-Saxon Charters. The home of the Beormingas Tribe at this time may well have been a large area encompassing many of the southernmost settlements without necessarily any central residential focus called “Birmingham”. In the Dark Ages different popultions across the region mirrored the geography. Following the Roman withdrawal after CE400 the dwellers in the South and West of the plateau tended to be Saxons under the Hwicce Tribe who had migrated Northwards after defeating the Britons at the Battle of Dyrham in CE577 and who were responsible for the foundation of Wessex. Meanwhile the dwellers in the Tame valley tended to be Angles who had colonised the land from the Humber Estuary – the area that became Mercia and later fell under the Viking Danelaw. Today the divide between the two populations may be otherwise represented by the division between the later dioceses of Worcester and Lichfield after Mercia converted to Christianity in the 7th Century. This divide runs through the centre of today’s Birmingham.
In the 10th Century, as part of building defences against the Vikings, Edward the Elder of Wessex organised the South-Western landscape into shires based on easily defended ‘County Towns’ in the curve of major rivers – Hereford, Gloucester, Worcester, Warwick, Stafford and Shrewsbury. The Birmingham Plateau therefore continued, not as an identified entity but as a border area in which the Parish of Birmingham was part of the Coleshill Hundred of the newly formed Warwickshire, whilst other nearby Parishes fell under Staffordshire, Worcestershire and occasionally Shropshire. Later a Collegiate Church was founded at Wolverhampton by Wulfrun in 994 after a Charter was given to her by King Ethelred.
The Domesday Book to the Middle Ages
Cradley, Dudley, Smethwick, Halesowen and Birmingham are amongst those given their first documented mention as minor settlements in the Domesday Book. Birmingham was estimated to be worth £200, with a woodland half a league long by 2 furlongs wide, land for 6 ploughs, 5 villagers and 2 smallholders, and was significantly smaller than nearby Aston. By now there were probably Norman Manor Houses at Birmingham, Aston, Duddeston and Erdington, Castle Bromwich, Edgbaston, Hamstead, Handsworth and Sheldon, Perry, Weoley Castle and Witton. The more northern rural areas were governed from the Norman castle at Dudley and were mainly woodland. But in 1166 it was Lord Peter de Birmingham who was living in the Manor House next to the River Rea in Digbeth when he applied for, and was granted by Henry II, a Charter to hold a weekly market at the top of Digbeth Hill and to charge Tolls thereon. This was possibly as recognition of, and a replacement for, a market already in operation in local churchyards. This was one of the earliest of 2000 such charters granted by the Kings over the next two centuries in an effort to remove such trading activities from church property. But the Charter given to Birmingham was the first on the Birmingham Plateau and it was granted 100 years before similar Charters were granted to Solihull, Halesowen, Sutton Coldfield or Wolverhampton so competition close-by was minimal. Once obtained, Peter de Birmingham set about building a new ‘market town’ by selling Burgage Plots to merchants, laying out the Bull Ring and diverting trading routes across the river Rea at Deritend. Within 30 years, by the time of Richard I in 1189, Birmingham was referred to as ‘a Town’, no longer just as ‘de Birmingham’s Castle’. Throughout the area wasteland began to be enclosed, woodland was cleared and the new Town expanded as did surrounding villages of Kings Norton, Yardley, Bordesley, Perry Barr and Erdington.
The thirteenth century saw the development of Dudley, Wolverhampton and Walsall into market towns and boroughs and an abbey founded at Halesowen. There are records that in 1232 a group of Burgesses (a taylor, a smith and 4 weavers) from Birmingham negotiated their release from their obligations to help with the Lord’s haymaking. This ability to gain release from Manorial duties started to attract a workforce from surrounding areas as well as from further afield, and by 1266 the Town had become a thriving centre of Tradesmen, Mercers and Purveyors. This growth continued after the purchase of a rival Market at Deritend from the Parish of Aston in 1270. By 1300 around 1000 people lived in the Town, and thirty years later Birmingham was larger than the more historic centres of Alcester, Stratford, Coleshill or Tamworth, and in Warwickshire was smaller only than Warwick and Coventry (which by now was the 4th largest urban area in England).
The Birmingham plateau had never lent itself to arable farming so the Birmingham market would have majored on cattle and sheep and related by-products of meat and milk, hides, leather, wool and linen. Increasingly the new merchant class also dealt in iron, brass and steel from local businesses that had spread across the plateau with availability of coal from the 30ft seam that reached the surface towards Rowley Regis. Birmingham also became an important transit point for many products travelling along on 2 important overland trade routes – firstly the old Drovers Road along Watling Street joining North Wales to Coventry and further on to the south-east and London, and secondly the newer Ryknild Street along which ships from Bristol could unload products (eg. wine) off the River Severn at Worcester for transport through Droitwich to Birmingham and on to Lichfield, Derby and the North East.
But from 1300 population growth in the area stagnated for the next 200 years. Birmingham suffered from a major fire in the early 1300s and famines of 1315 and 1322 were followed by visitations of the Black Death around 1350. There is evidence of pottery and tile manufacture at this time, and by 1400 there were 4 forges in the “borough” of Birmingham (the built-up area of the Town – the open agricultural area to the northwest was known as ‘the Foreign’) where there were around a dozen fulling mills nearby for cloth. These were mainly converted from old corn mills but the one at Holford near Perry Barr had been purpose built. Birmingham was a Wool town and one- third of the wool and cloth trade in Warwickshire (other than Coventry) now took place here. The Jewellery Trade was already in existence at this time in Birmingham with evidence of Goldsmiths in the Town in 1384 and 1460. In 1439 the de Birmingham Lords of the Manor negotiated for the Town to be free of Royal Purveyors and from then the Town remained free of the restrictive Trade Guilds suffered by many Chartered Boroughs (including nearby Coventry)across the country and which hampered their growth.
By 1520 the population of Birmingham was around 1000 people, still smaller than both Coventry and Warwick but change was afoot. Between 1530 and 1550 the Priory of St Thomas was suppressed and sold during Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries, and the Religious Guilds of The Holy Cross and of St John were disbanded. Significantly also the de Birmingham family lost control of the Manor that they had held for 400 years and the subsequent lack of strong Manorial Control, coupled with the lack of Guild Control, gave the Townspeople a high degree of economic and social freedom that they used to their great advantage.
The beginnings of change from 1550 to 1770
There is evidence that coal was extracted (possibly from the 30ft seam that hits the surface here) and used across the Birmingham plateau from Medieval times and metal working became important from the sixteenth century. The first blast furnace is recorded at West Bromwich in the 1560s. Many people had agricultural smallholdings but supplemented their income from home-based forges making nails and working as smiths. In Birmingham King Edwards Free Grammar School was established in 1552 in the Guild’s old buildings in New Street. John Rogers of Deritend translated the first ever English edition of the bible and Birmingham Library opened in 1642. Leather and textiles remained important commodities for the town, but other activity across the Plateau increasingly turned to the production of iron goods as the raw materials from the area between Birmingham and Wolverhampton increasingly became exploitable and mining methods improved, spurred on by the availability of iron-ore and coal from the huge 30ft seam.
It was Birmingham that became the commercial hub for all of the manufacturing activity that spread across the area. The merchants there acted as the middlemen for the nail makers, the iron forges, the furnaces, the smithies and the toy-makers across the area, organising the supply of their raw materials, coordinating work and resources from the Forest of Dean to Cheshire whilst at the same time marketing and selling their products. As metal working increased, the Fulling Mills in the area were converted into Blade Mills. In the 1600s the simpler trades of making nails, scythes, sickles and bridles for agricultural use moved away from Birmingham onto the Plateau enabling the Town to specialise in the finer or more complicated areas of pewter, solder and lead-work, making buckles, hilts and swords, scales, wire and locks. By 1620 it was said that there were 20,000 smiths within 10 miles of Dudley Castle. The first Slitting Mill was built at Kinver in 1628 simplifying the process of producing nail-rods from iron bar. Importantly across the whole area a new social structure was born where mobility was possible between the levels, far removed from the rigid deference and paternalism of the feudal society that had existed for centuries and which still existed in the countryside, or from the Guilds that ruled many towns and cities.
At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642, Dudley, Wolverhampton and Aston remained staunchly Royalist providing the King with shot from Stourbridge and cannon from Dudley. Forges and mills existed on every stream and brook in North Worcestershire producing sword-blades and pike-heads, while Dud Dudley, a Colonel in the Royalist army had experience with iron-making and produced vast amounts of bar-iron fit for making muskets, carbines and bolts for the King’s army.
Birmingham meanwhile was a hotbed of Puritan and Parliamentary radicalism which held out against the King, where Robert Porter, a sword-maker in Digbeth, recognised as being the best in England, made his product only for Cromwell. When it became necessary Birmingham sent an army of 400 men to Coventry to help them resist Royalist attack. Birmingham swordsmen reputably made 15000 blades for the Parliamentary cause. Then Birmingham men ambushed Prince Rupert in Kings Norton, and attacked the Royal baggage train while the King was staying at nearby Aston Hall. Revenge was extracted when Prince Rupert overran the town at the Battle of Camp Hill (just south of Digbeth bridge) in 1643 burning eighty houses leaving behind the naked corpses of fifteen townspeople. But retribution was returned when by the end of that year the Parliamentarian Tinker Fox organised a body of men in Birmingham that took Aston Hall from the Royalists and made regular forays into Royalist Worcestershire.
At the cessation of hostilities all this activity meant that the folk on the Birmingham plateau were ready to face the challenges of the new era that followed the Civil War, whether under Parliament or King. The corresponding growth in population meant the town was capable of not only embracing the changes that were coming, but also of ensuring that there was sufficient workforce to become responsible for leading England into the industrial age. In 1650 the population of Birmingham was estimated at around 5,000. By 1700 this had risen to 15,000 and by 1730 it was estimated at 20,000. By 1770 the Town had reached maybe 40,000 and by 1800 it was over 80,000 and was now the third largest in the Kingdom behind only London and Bristol, perhaps the second largest once the area across to Wolverhampton was included. By 1851 the population had grown to 230,000.
The area remained at the forefront of development. The glass industry of Stourbridge probably arrived with the Huguenots in the early 1700s. In 1712 the earliest documented and working Newcomen Steam Engine in the World was commissioned by Lord Dudley to pump water from his coal mines. By 1750 Bilston had gained a reputation as producing high class enamelling and japanning products and finishes. In 1757 John Wilkinson’s ironworks at Bradley near Oldbury was the first to begin producing cast iron by coke-smelting rather than charcoal. He was also the inventor of the first precision boring machine capable of making accurately cast-iron cannon barrels and piston cylinders.
The means of distribution became paramount to the success of the area and this was initially hampered by the state of the roads. Then in 1770 canals became open to public subscription and in the next fifty years 160 miles of canals were built across Birmingham and the Black Country joining almost every pit, smith, factory and forge to the coast. The Birmingham Canal Network was started first by James Brindley, then altered and improved by Thomas Telford and others with Birmingham and the Black Country at their heart. By 1785 Birmingham and Wolverhampton were almost joined by the ribbon development along the 14-mile turnpiked road. Below the ridge of hills the plateau is largely flat. Between Birmingham City Centre and Tipton Telford’s Main-line Canal runs for 10 miles along the 453ft contour where it rises only 20 feet to the 473ft contour for the remaining five miles into Wolverhampton. Only at Oldbury does the canal rise further to 511 feet on an arm towards the old quarries around Rowley Regis.
The reputation of Birmingham, with the area that became known as the Black Country, as the City of 1000 trades sprang from this social and informational mobility. And whilst other cities embraced large factories, the Birmingham area instead played host to thousands of individual workshops, benefitting from raw material available locally. It was also in Birmingham that the Lunar Society met on the nights of the full moon between 1765 and 1813, peopled by leading industrialists, natural philosophers and intellectuals including Matthew Boulton, James Watt, Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestly, Josiah Wedgwood and even Benjamin Franklin. This Society was perhaps the best known of hundreds of clubs, taverns and coffee houses open across Birmingham for free association, discussion and debate, often crossing lines of social class and status, all to a level that caused the Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger much disquiet and afeared of an English Revolution that might follow those in America and France. It said that in 1791 Pitt encouraged the Priestley Riots across Birmingham that targeted non-conformists, drove liberal thinkers underground and persuaded Priestley to depart these shores and live in America.
For some industries the invention of larger machines and looms proved too expensive to be purchased by individuals and it became more common for some industries to be centralised in mechanised factories powered by a central waterwheel. The interplay of ideas available across Birmingham and the Black Country and their associated discussion and innovation was immortalised in the great Boulton & Watt Manufactory, completed in 1762, sited in Soho between Smethwick and Birmingham. Free from the restrictions placed by Guilds, and with the new social mobility, the growth of the area began to accelerate rapidly, a process that was accelerated by two occurrences – firstly the invention of the condensing steam engine by James Watt which finally freed industry from the need to be situated on water sources for their power, and secondly the building of a huge network of canals linking Birmingham and the Black Country to the ports at London, Bristol, Liverpool and Hull, thus bringing a solution to the problem of onward distribution to the country and to the rest of the World.
For many thousands of years the English workforce had been almost entirely agricultural, dependent not only upon water-sources, the seasons and the weather to determine their chances of survival from hunger, plague or disease. In addition they had to rely on the goodwill of the feudal rule of the local Manor House and the ruling classes for wages and food. Now the rising population had the choice of an alternative, to move to the new industrialised areas where they could literally forge their own destinies for the first time. They were attracted there by the promise of regular wages, full time work for men and for women (at least until more than a couple of children arrived unless more elderly relatives could be turned to for child-care) and also for work for children who were employed from as soon as they were able to assume a role. It is true however that new workers arrived often into tightly packed low-cost housing where conditions were poor and sewage disposal and running water remained unknown with all of the consequences this brought for crime, poverty and disease.
There were no trade unions, no minimum wage, indeed virtually no rules. Workers of all ages were employed in factories and in stone and coal mines where there was little or no thought given to health and safety standards. Yet for the first time in centuries, from 1770 work-life expectancy beyond childbirth began to rise…..
But Came they all to Birmingham
World History Archive. TopFoto.
An eastern view of Birmingham in 1779.
Plan of Birmingham surveyed by Thomas Hanson 1778.
Staffordshire 1770 J Ellis
Staffordshire 1830 T Murray
But Came They All to Birmingham 