| Ownership
Yardley was a possession of Pershore Abbey from the mid-10th century
for about two centuries. As part of Pershore Hundred it was included
in the shire of Worcester established by King Edgar about 1000
A.D., though its geographical position should have placed it in
Warwickshire. The Beauchamps and their successors as Earls of
Warwick, the Nevilles, held the manor from 1260 until 1473. Thereafter
it was in the hands or the gift of the Crown until 1629, when
Sir Richard Grevis of Moseley Hall acquired the lordship. His
descendants sold much of the land, and only one-seventh of the
manor remained to the last of the line, Henshaw Grevis, who in
1766 sold it with the title to John Taylor, the wealthy Birmingham
manufacturer. He thus acquired Greet Mill Hill Farm, and a large
part of Swanshurst Quarter.
In 1254 Studley Priory bought large estates in Yardley and
Greet. They included Greet demesne, Lyddstree, Riddings, and Shaftmoor
- roughly the area between the Cole, Tyseley Brook, and the Nine
Stiles Walk. Maxstoke Priory gained by purchase and bequest even
more land over two centuries: Great Mill Hill, Hollies, Hawes
House, and the Breaches, in central Yardley; and Greethurst, Sarehole,
and Swanshurst in the south. At the Dissolution, about 1540, all
the property of the religious houses was sequestrated and sold
off. The Greswolds then acquired the 'manor of Greet' (which was
probably never a fully independent manor within Yardley), and
were possessed of 467 acres in 1562.
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