Anon he is assailed by the tempests, stumbles over the ridges, is bemired in the hollows, the sun hides his face, and his own is sorrowful--this is the lot of the historian; he has no choice of subject, merry or mournful, he must submit to the changes which offer; delighted with the prosperous tale, depressed with the gloomy.
I am told, this work has often drawn a smile from the reader; it has often drawn a sigh from me. A celebrated painter fell in love with the picture he drew; I have wept at mine--Such is the chapter of the Lords, and the Workhouse. We are not always proof against a melancholy or a tender sentiment.
Having pursued our several stages, with various fortune, through fifty chapters, at the close of this last tragic scene, emotion and the journey cease together.
Upon King's-wood, five miles from Birmingham, and two hundred yards east of the Alcester-road, runs a bank for near a mile in length, unless obliterated by the new inclosure; for I saw it complete in 1775. This was raised by the famous Roger Mortimer, Earl of March, about 1324, to inclose a wood, from whence the place derives its name.
Then that feeble monarch, Edward the Second, governed the kingdom; the amorous Isabella, his wife, governed the king, and the gallant Mortimer governed the queen.
The parishes of King's-norton, Solihull, Yardley, uniting in this wood, and enjoying a right of commons, the inhabitants conceived themselves injured by the inclosure, assembled in a body, threw down the fence, and murdered the Earl's bailiff.
Mortimer, in revenge, procured a special writ from the Court of Common Pleas, and caused the matter to be tried at Bromsgrove, where the affrighted inhabitants, over-awed with power, durst not appear in their own vindication. The Earl, therefore, recovered a verdict, and the enormous sum of 300l. damage. A sum nearly equal, at that time, to the fee-simple of the three parishes.
The confusion of the times, and the poverty of the people, protracted payment, till the unhappy Mortimer, overpowered by his enemies, was seized as a criminal in Nottingham-castle; and, without being heard, executed at Tyburn, in 1328.
The distressed inhabitants of our three parishes humbly petitioned the crown, for a reduction of the fine; when Edward the Third was pleased to remit about 260l.
We can assign no reason for this imprudent step of inclosing the wood, unless the Earl intended to procure a grant of the manor, then in the crown, for his family. But what he could not accomplish by family, was accomplished by fortune; for George the Third, King of Great Britain, is lord of the manor of King's-norton, and a descendant from the house of Mortimer.