The administrative Quarters of Yardley
(The map was drawn by John Morris Jones and later published
in Medieval Yardley, by Victor Skipp)
Yardley is mentioned in a Charter of 972 as a possession of
Pershore Abbey, in Worcestershire. In the Domesday Book it is
an appurtenant manor of Beoley, also a possession of Pershore.
Various families held the manor, including the Earls of Warwick:
Anne Countess of Warwick gave it to Henry VII in 1487-8. It went
to Katharine of Aragon in 1533 on her divorce from Henry VIII,
and back to him on her death. In 1629 Sir Richard Grevis of Moseley
Hall bought the lordship of Yardley from the Crown, although not
all of the land was included, and in 1766 the lordship was bought
by the manufacturer John Taylor of Bordesley Hall.
In Tudor times a Civil Parish was established, co-extensive
with the manor and ecclesiastical parish, to replace the lapsed
manorial system of local government. The administrative divisions
were the Quarters. Yardley was conveniently cut into four parts
by the highways to Coventry, Warwick, and Stratford: originally
all of the manor south of Warwick Road was administered together
as Broomhall Quarter, so sparse was its population, but later
Swanshurst was separated from Broomhall. The other Quarters were
Greet and Church End. By the 18th century each of the Quarters
had been sub-divided into Near and Far parts. Yardley became a
Rural District Council in 1895, and passed to Birmingham in 1911.
Urbanisation of Yardley (introduction)
The natural landscape
Ownership and administration
Yardley in medieval times (map)
Yardley at the end of the eighteenth
century (map)
The early 19th century
The mid-nineteenth century
The Victorian half-century 1850-1900
The last years of independence
Development 1911-20
Two decades 1919-39
Yardley since the war
Urbanization maps
Surviving antiquities of Yardley (map,
1981)
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