The manor of Sutton was restored to the Earls of Warwick by the Crown in 1126 and they were granted the right to create a deer park. In about 1130 they built a hunting lodge on a prominent site overlooking an area known as Wyndeleye where they established the entrance to their new park.. There was at that time no town as such and no church. A chapel dedicated to St Blaise ( an Armenian saint - feast day 3rd February - who was then somewhat less obscure than in the present day) was established in this new ‘Manor House’

The presence of visiting nobility in the area for hunting created a need for local services and eventually a township grew up. In due course an alternative nearby hill was chosen as the site for a church and the town developed around it.

The Warwicks held the Manor of Sutton until 1487 when Countess Anne relinquished her holding in favour of the Crown. The Warwick influence in Sutton began its decline however in 1419 when the Manor House, estates, deer park and pools were leased out to Sir Ralph Bracebridge for life in exchange for an obligation to supply thr Earl with nine lancers and seventeen bowmen as and when requested, and ceased altogether in 1499 when the then Duke was executed.

The Bracebridges were a local family and had little need for a Manor House., which fell into disrepair and was demolished at about this time.

In about 1553 Robert Perrott built a new farmhouse on the foundations of the old Manor. The widow of Robert Perrott remarried Marmaduke Dawney and later Dawneys lived there until the death of Thomas Dawney in 1671.

Writing in 1762 the somewhat cynical Impartial Hand said ‘ the Manor fell into utter ruin’... ‘ by some means afterwards it became the property of some obscure persons ... at present serving only for the residence of a labourer’...’ the last gentleman who lived in the house was Dawney’

At some point in the 1600 or 1700s the Bracebridge estates including the Manor and its lands had fallen to the Holtes of Aston Hall. From the Holtes the estates fell by inheritance in 1817 to Digby of Meriden and then in 1827 to Lord Somerville. Up to that time the Manor farmhouse had been let out to a series of tenants.

Somerville demolished the old farmhouse and rebuilt. When this house was offered for sale in 1906 ( by the estate of its most recent occupier the late Thomas Hayward) it occupied a four acre site, the tenure was a 99 year leasehold from 1864 and access was via a winding driveway to Manor Road.

On the death of the last Lord Somerville in 1864 the Manor estates fell to his five daughters and between then and 1930 the lands, fields and pools were sold off piecemeal.

Rev Joseph Mendham MA was born in 1769 and baptised in the ancient City church of St Stephen Walbrook. After ordination he was appointed assistant and later curate at Holy Trinity, Sutton Coldfield during the Rectorship of John Riland. He followed as curate, the Rev Bick, who had served Richard Blisse Riland, and who did not hit it off with the new Rector, brother of his predecessor, from whom he held a different theological viewpoint. Mendham having married Maria Riland second daughter of the new Rector, in 1795 was, in due course , unsurprisingly, appointed to take his turn and served in 1807 and 1808 in the high office of Warden of the town.

He was an antiquarian and avid collector of books relating to Catholicism to which he was implacably opposed.

In 1820 following the death of George the Third he preached a vitriolic anti Catholic sermon at Holy Trinity. The sermon , later published as a thirteen page tract, referred to Catholicism as ‘ an arrogant and sanguinary church’

He is mentioned in the Holbeche Diary and lived at the top end of High Street beyond the Grammar School . After the Catholic Emancipation Act was passed in 1829, a Catholic church was built in 1834 not many yards from his residence. His comments were not recorded.

He had one son Rev Robert Riland Mendham of Wadham College who died quite young and unmarried.

His collection of over 5000 volumes was preserved after his death in 1856 by the Law Society. It was catalogued in 1871 and again in 1985. In 1994 it was deposited with Canterbury Cathedral Library.

Jane Pudsey widow of the last of the Pudseys of Langley Hall with an income of £800 a year, remarried William Willson, a less than weathy builder and architect and student of Sir Christopher Wren. In 1680 he designed and built in stone, Moat Hall at the top of Sutton High Street, with lodge, moat and stone bridge.

The moat survived until 1860; the lodge and house still stand.

When he died in 1710 Willson was buried, not with his wife within Holy Trinity parish church but due to objections from her family, outside just adjacent to the external wall of the church. When the church was later extended in 1874 he belatedly entered the church.

Willson’s Pudsey stepdaughters married Ffolliat and Jesson and Willson designed Four Oaks Hall for the former and her husband.

Willson died in 1710, and his son died without issue in 1728 when Moat Hall passed to the Jessons.

Joseph Duncumb Warden of Sutton 1760/61 bought Moat House from William Jesson. His daughter Eliza married Shirley Farmer Steele Perkins a barrister in 1793 but died in 1816. Perkins, who was Warden of the town in 1804, was living at Moat Hall at the time of the 1841 census. He died in 1852.

In 1891 and 1898 the house was the home of Richard Hurst Sadler a local solicitor.

In June1948 when the freehold was offered for sale, the nine bedroom mansion boasted gardens and pasture of over 8 acres running down to the railway line

SEE DUNCUMB

MOOR HALL

In about 1527 Bishop Vesey bought for £1500 forty acres of land called Moor Crofts and Heath Yards close to the farm in which he had been raised, and built in brick a substantial mansion for his own occupation. When he was not in London on Court duties or in Exeter (very rarely) on church duties, he lived at Moor Hall in great style. It is said he employed 140 scarlet liveried servants.

In 1551 he retired on a pension of £485 a year at the age of about 88 but lived only a further four years. When he died in 1555 Moor Hall fell to his nephew John Harman who sold it in 1584 to Richardson. The next owners or occupiers included Sir Hugh Brawne and Gawen, Fulke and Leicester Grovenor

In 1665 Arthur Fleetwood may have been resident there, as church records register a child born to him at Moor Hall in that year.

John Addyes acquired the property about this time. The 1671 Valuation of Sutton Coldfield shows the property in the possession of John Addyes with a value of £61.

The Addyes remained in occupation until 1762 when on the death of another John Addyes the estate fell to nephew John Hackett second son of Andrew Hackett of Moxhull Hall.

At this time the property was said to comprise twenty rooms on three floors but was described in 1762 by an’ Impartial Hand ‘as ‘ a very poor pile of building, without prospect or indeed any any one beauty to recommend it to a man of taste’ - ‘ the timber is said to be as valuable as the land’

All four sons of Francis Beynon Hackett predeceased him and after the mid 1800s the house saw a series of tenants, A relative of Sir Robert Peel lived there for 22 years; the author of the Holbeche Diary recalls a Mr Garnet as tenant, Sampson was tenant in 1875 and Samuel Lloyd MP in 1881.

In 1903 Colonel Edward Ansell of Ansells Brewery bought the house , demolished it and in 1905 built an entirely new modern mansion for his own occupation in its place.The Ansells lived there until 1930 when the whole estate including 290 acres was put up for sale. It was sold for £35000 to a local builder Streather who converted the 1905 mansion into a hotel, created a golf course on the park and in exchange was granted permission to develop the remaining land with upmarket residential properties

The 1905 house remains substantially intact although much altered and extended

SEE ADDYES

SEE GARNETT

SEE HACKETT

The original Moot Hall was a mediaeval structure similar to the Market Hall at Warwick, comprising an open market place at ground floor level and rooms above. It was built at the expense of Bishop Vesey serving as a Town Hall, and a prison in the basement. It was situated at the centre of the junction of High Street, Mill Street and Coleshill Street more or less where the present traffic island stands.

It was demolished as a result of the disaster which occurred following the funeral of Thomas Dawney in 1671

The replacement building which stood on the same spot served as the Town Hall until it too was demolished on safety grounds in 1854.

Thereafter it seems that the old workhouse was converted to Corporation offices and used as such until the Town Hall ( now Masonic Buildings) was built in Mill Street in 1859.

SEE DAWNEY

The original Manor house at Moxhull was on the site then known as Moxhull Park, where the Belfry Golf Hotel now stands. Moxhull was held in the 14th and 15th centuries by the Arden family from the Earls of Warwick.

By 1480 Henry de Lisle had acquired the estate. In 1498, by virtue of his marriage to heiress Anna Leycroft, his son John acquired 365 acres, nineteen messuages and two shops in ‘Colleshull’

Thomas Lisle was Warden of the town of Sutton Coldfield in 1545,1557 and 1563.When John Lisle died in about 1670 without a male heir, the estate fell to Andrew Hackett, son of the Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, who had married one of the co-heir Lisle daughters.

The Hacketts held Moxhull until 1815 when a later Andrew Hackett died without issue. His widow remarried Berkeley Noel whose son sold the estate to Thomas Ryland in 1860.

In the 1891 census there were no family members at home, but there were a butler, a cook, four maids, two gardeners and two grooms living on the premises

In 1900 a mysterious fire destroyed the house but it was not replaced on the Moxhull Park site. Instead, Howard Ryland, Lord Lieutenant of the county and then owner built a new mansion on a nearby site at Holly Lane, Wishaw. This is the property now known as Moxhull Hall.

Thomas Howard Ryland, grandson of Howard, sold the estate in 1929.

In 1969 the house was converted to an hotel.

SEE HACKETT