Person:Richard Smalbroke (1)

Owned a shop on the High Street, dealing in ironwares, spices and textiles. He served as a bailiff for a number of years and was instrumental in the foundation of King Edwards School in New Street.

SMALBROKE FAMILY OF BIRMINGHAM

The Smalbroke family are first recorded in the Birmingham area in 1425/6, when William Smalbroke is recorded as a trustee of charitable property at Yardley [584318 = DV 860]. They appear to have remained yeomen in Yardley throughout the 15th century, and in the late 16th century built Blakesley Hall; the first reference to them in Birmingham is a record of Richard Smalbroke occupying a tenement and croft in Park Street at the time of the 1553 survey of Birmingham. From the late 16th century successive generations describe themselves as 'of Birmingham, mercer' and beginning in the mid 16th century, they steadily accumulated small pieces of freehold property in and around the town. The bulk of the collection described below consists of title deeds documenting the way this estate was built up. Not all of the key documents are present in the collection, and it is therefore helpful that Thomas Smalbroke (1585-1649) kept detailed accounts of his payments of tithes on agricultural property in the family's account book. These confirm the slow process by which his property grew between 1608 (when he inherited six fields from his father] and 1646 [when he owned some twenty properties].

Both Thomas Smalbroke and his son Richard married three times; and Richard continued the process of enlarging the estates in the difficult years of the Civil War and Commonwealth. Richard's third wife was Margaret Knight, widow of a successful London lawyer whose family owned an estate at Rowington (Warwickshire). The family's ties with the Knights were strengthened in the next generation, when Samuel Smalbroke married successively Elizabeth Knight and Elizabeth Kine (née Knight), and by 1682 Samuel Smalbroke was styling himself 'of Rowington, gent'. It was Samuel Smalbroke's acquisition of the Rowington estate which completed the family's transition from burgesses to country gentlemen, and his son Richard (1672-1749) was not only educated as a gentleman but became a clergyman and successively bishop of St Davids and of Lichfield and Coventry. Bishop Smalbroke settled the family estate on his three sons Richard, William and Samuel shortly before his death in 1749. Richard Smalbroke (d. 1805) was the last surviving son of the bishop, and on his death at an advanced age the family property passed to the surviving children of his sister Catherine (who had married the Rev William Vyse in 1733), the Rev Dr William Vyse, rector of Lambeth (d. 1816) and General Richard Vyse (d. 1825). The estate then passed to General Vyse's successors, the Howard-Vyse family of Stoke Park, Stoke Poges. The latest documents in the collection relate to the late Victorian period, when some of the property was sold off for urban redevelopment.

The Smalbrokes' Birmingham estate did not form a compact block of property, but was scattered over a wide area. Plans of some of the pieces of land made in the 19th century give valuable insights into the exact locations of these plots]. The intermarriage of the Smalbroke and Vyse families added to the existing estate a substantial landholding in Staffordshire, which was thereafter administered as part of the Birmingham estate, as evidenced by the rentals, 1743-1873 described below, which reveal an annual estate income of around £1000 by the 1820s. The records of the Howard-Vyse family's estate at Stoke Place, Stoke Poges, are in the Buckinghamshire Record Office.

Most of this archive concerns the development of the estate, and it contains only a few personal papers. These include a decorated list of pupils in the 4th, 5th and 6th forms at Winchester College, 1731; and the detailed accounts of William Smalbroke as executor of his father, the bishop, (1749)-53, which include payments for books and for the bishop's monument in Lichfield Cathedral. The Knight family are represented by a series of letters and accounts from the mid 17th century, which are of particular interest as representing the concerns of a middle-class family during the Civil War.

Richard Smalbroke. In 1468 a William, in 1522 a John, and in 1532 a Robert Smalbroke, are to be met with as living at Yardley. The name is not found in the Subsidy Roll of 1524 for Birmingham, yet, in 1540, Richard Smalbroke, yeoman, was appointed a feoffee of William Lench's Trust. At that time he held the Well House, in English Market, with barns, &c, in Edgbaston Street, and land in the Foreign. In 1552, he was Bailiff of the town, and a leading man in the foundation of the Free School. To him must be given some of the credit in obtaining from the Crown the restitution of a portion of the plunder of the Gild lands, by means of the petition of the inhabitants of Birmingham, and very many other subjects of the whole country neighbourhood thereunto. From this period the Smalbrokes are found in every list of names connected with the public trusts. In 1544, in consideration of a sum of money, he conveyed land at Sheldon, to charitable uses. Subsequently he also gave 10s. yearly from the profits of a Salt Vat at Droitwich to the poor of Birmingham, and an entry in an old Vestry Book, states the rent to be paid out of " a quarter phats walling, springing in the pit at Upwich, theretofore the inheritance of Mrs. Packington, then in the possession of Elizabeth Smalbroke, widow." Richard Snialbroke died in 1575, leaving several children, viz., Mary, wife of Thomas Buther, Master of the Free School; Ann, wife of Thomas Fox, of Yardley; Bridgett, wife of Ambrose Rotton; Dorothy, the wife of John Couper, and a son, Thomas. The latter, who was a mercer, married Elizabeth, daughter of William Colmore, 20th November, 1570, and on the same day, his sister Bridgett Smalbroke married Ambrose Rotton. Thomas had several children, three sons, Richard, Thomas, and Robert, were all described as mercers—the two former had large families. In 1613, a Richard Smalbroke died at the Ravenhurst. Another Thomas Smalbroke, was a lawyer of large practice between 1625 and 1660. His office was near the church, presumably in the ancient Priest Chambers over the gateway of the church, which he held under a lease from the Crown. In 1636, Richard .Smalbroke, gentleman, purchased with various other properties in New Street, Edgbaston Street, and Moor Street, these Priests' Chambers, being described as formerly in the occupation of the Priests of the late Gild of the Holy Cross of Birmingham, of late demised inter alia to Thomas Smalbroke, so that they should have formed part of the Free School Endowment. The Family House, No. 2, High Street, near Moor Street, after an ownership of 150 years, was sold in 1695, by Samuel Smalbroke, and Elizabeth, his wife, then of Rowington, the parents of Bishop Smalbroke, the description being " the two messuages or tenements, together with the shopps. warehouses, stallage, bulkes, freeboords, penthouses, yards, courts, pavements, brickwall_, garden, summer-house, trees, entries, eavesdropps, &c, in the Corn Cheaping or High Street, or both, formerly in the tenure of the said

(Survey of Birmingham made in the first year of Queen Mary 1553)