When the original Beormingas, the Sons of Beorm (whoever he may have been), settled here, in the dim Saxon past, they founded better than they knew; but they chose a hill-top, a place where no river runs, unless we choose thus to dignify the little stream called the Rea. This lack of watercourses mattered nothing at all to mediæval Birmingham, but when, in spite of all disabilities, the place rose into commercial importance, the want began to be severely felt, and herculean have been the efforts in modern times to effect a proper water-supply.
Little but scattered mention is heard of Birmingham and its smiths before the Civil War, but when that struggle broke out, they were heard of to some purpose. Its 4000 inhabitants in 1643 were Puritans to a man, and warlike. They furnished 15,000 sword-blades for Cromwell’s troops, and at a convenient opportunity waylaid the King’s carriage and seized it, his furniture, and his plate. For these enormities Prince Rupert came later from Daventry and punished them severely in a battle on Camp Hill, overlooking the town. Many Birmingham men were slain that day, and eighty houses burnt; the whole affair piteously related in a tract of that time called “The Bloody Prince; or, a Declaration of the Most Cruell Practises of Prince Rupert and the rest of the Cavaliers, in fighting against God and the true Ministers of his Church.” A woodcut intended to portray that sanguinary Prince appears on the cover, with Birmingham flaming furiously in the background; Daventry in the rear. The rest of the Cavaliers appear to be manœuvring somewhere else; at any rate, Rupert is alone, on horseback, with a mild expression of countenance and a big pistol.
Twenty-two years later the Plague depopulated the town, but in another twenty-three years it had grown to double its former size, and by 1791 numbered between 70,000 and 80,000. Yet it had no Parliamentary representation until 1832.
That Birmingham is seated on a hill is not so evident to railway travellers, but he who comes to it by road is well advised of the fact at Bull Ring, where the hilly entrance confronts him. Bull Ring is old Birmingham of a hundred years and more ago; the nucleus of the town, and little altered since David Cox drew his picture of the market there. The market remains, but there has come about since his day an extraordinary popular appreciation of the beauty of flowers, so that, instead of the fowls pictured largely in his view, the crowded stalls are radiant with blooms of every sort; cut flowers, and growing plants.
Here stands, as ever, St. Martin’s, the mother-church of Birmingham, where the ancient manorial lords of the place lie; those de Berminghams whose last representative was choused out of his rights in 1545. Here is that statue of Nelson for whose proper cleansing a patriotic tradesman left by will sixpence a week; and here occurred the Wesley riots of 1742 and the Chartist Riot of 1839. When Charles Wesley sought to preach, the people set the church bells a-ringing to drown his voice, and then began to pelt him with dirt and turnips; but the political riot was a much more serious affair, resulting in the pillaging of shops and houses, and immense damage.
II
In Birmingham, close upon four hundred years ago, Leland found but one street, yet that street was full of smiths, making knives and “all manner of cuttinge tooles, and many loriners that make bittes, and a great many naylors. Soe that a great part of the towne is maintained by smithes, who have their iron and sea-cole out of Staffordshire.”
Not only has Birmingham grown out of all knowledge since that time, but it has largely changed its trades. Sheffield has taken away the pick of the cutlery trade, and that of the loriners has its chief seat at Walsall; but Birmingham now makes everything, from a monster engine to a pin’s head, and in the murderous art of manufacturing fire-arms is pre-eminent.
“She is,” observed an enthusiastic writer, “in the truest sense the benefactress of the universal man, from the crowned head to the savage of the wilderness.” To the crowned heads, for example—or to their governments—Birmingham supplies stands of arms and ammunition; and to the savage, guns warranted to hurt no one but he who uses them. Civilisation is thus heavily indebted to Birmingham, and religion too; for if the heathen, who “in his blindness bows down to wood and stone,” is no longer restricted to those two materials, by reason of Birmingham industriously supplying little tin and brass gods by wholesale, and at extremely low prices, to Africa or India, yet on Sundays the godly folks of her hundred churches and chapels liberally subscribe to missionary funds for spreading Christianity in strange lands, and thus help to discredit the heathen Vishnus, Sivas, Hanumans, and assorted Mumbo-Jumbos they export.
