Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

In the Middle Ages all the grain grown in Sutton was ground at the manorial corn mill which stood at the bottom off Mill Street. This mill was damaged by a flood in 1668, and was eventually converted into a skinning mill where hides were cleaned b...

The Sutton Coldfield Court of March 28th 1552 ordered Ralph Gibbons to place himself in a convent, and told him he would be punished if he was caught wandering or molesting the brothers or anyone else - an early example of how society dealt with i...

In the eighteenth century, treatment of mental illness was carried out by non-licensed practitioners, who often ran their “Madhouses” as a commercial enterprise and with little regard for the inmates. A Parliamentary committee investig...

A Select Committee of the House of Commons inquired into the merits of two proposed railway lines from the fourth to the seventh of July 1859. Witnesses from Sutton and Erdington came and testified, giving evidence in favour either the “Birmingham...

Miss Bracken says that the name Maney derives from the Celtic “meini”, meaning stone, in her 1860 History of the Forest and Chase of Sutton Coldfield. A prehistoric settlement at Maney is a possibility, as it lies where building stone outcrops nex...

One of the five medieval Quarters of Sutton was named “Maney and the Wylde”. Most of the houses in this quarter were gathered in the hamlet of Maney, centred on a village green where the “Old Smithy” now stands, and extendi...

A perambulation of the boundary of Sutton Coldfield made in 1824 describes the section between Little Hay and Canwell Gate as having “Lands of Admiral Manley on the left”. Admiral Manley had inherited over thirteen hundred acres of lan...

Sutton Coldfield Manor House was pulled down in the 1520s. It had been more like a castle, with a curtain wall and a gatehouse, and the stone buildings included the Chapel of St. Blaise. In its hey-day in the twelfth century it would have been a g...

In feudal times all the villagers were tenants of the lord of the manor, but the lord also retained some land and property for his own use, called the demesne. The extent of the demesne in Sutton Coldfield is given in the Domesday Book of 1086 as ...

The Domesday Book, compiled in 1086 for William the Conqueror, is a survey of all the manors in England. Sutton Coldfield is included, one of over 350 manors in Warwickshire, and details of its size and assets are given. The survey does not mentio...