Introduction
By Howard S. Pearson
(Chairman of the Reference Library Book Sub-Committee).
The Public Reference Library of the City of Birmingham will soon contain 300,000 separate items. A complete printed catalogue of a library so extensive as this might be too large to be manageable or practically useful; and separate catalogues of some of the more important divisions may, perhaps, be all that can be profitably undertaken. Of these the Birmingham Collection, while far from being in any sense the most really valuable, is certainly the one which most pressingly calls for a catalogue. It is the one department in which a modern and provincial library may, and must, be expected to be supreme. In many directions completeness may be beyond its means or out of its power; but as regards the life and history of its district it is reasonably expected to be the final authority. The very bulk of the present volume will bear witness that, from the beginning, this duty must in Birmingham have been recognised and faithfully performed.
The greatness and commercial importance of Birmingham are of modern growth, but the town itself is an ancient one. It is at least a thousand, and probably twelve hundred years old; and, as in all such cases, the earliest records are mainly documentary and legal, each separate item being unique and correspondingly difficult to obtain. Here it is that the effects of the lamentable fire of 1879 were most fatal. The printed books that were lost have long since been replaced, but the manuscripts in the Staunton, the Hamper and the Archer collections have left gaps which can never be filled.
Every effort, however, has been made to form a fresh collection, and nearly a thousand deeds ranging from the years 963 to 1800 are in the library. Some few of these are careful transcripts, but the great majority are original documents. These deeds, very briefly described, occupy some forty pages of the catalogue, and it is interesting to find the names of some of our old streets—High Street with its many aliases, Dale End, Bull Street, Moor Street, New Street—in ink which has been dry for five hundred years. Though scarcely literary, those legal documents are often inspiring. The thirteenth century must have been one of remarkable energy and enterprise in Birmingham. Within a hundred years nearly coincident with this century, a handsome parish church was built, the ecclesiastical rights over that portion of the parish of Aston which adjoins Birmingham were purchased, and the church of St. John, Deritend, was erected as the actual property of the people concerned. Gilds were founded both in Deritend and in Birmingham, the latter of which still survives in the Grammar School of King Edward, a well-endowed Priory was established, and a charter was obtained for a four-days Fair. These were no mean achievements in a single century for a mere market town.
