How sadly the times were changed in 1840,
may be imagined from the fact that when free passages to Australia were
first being offered, no less than 10,000 persons applied unsuccessfully
from this town and neighbourhood alone. At the present time it is
calculated that passages to America, Canada, Australia, &c., are being
taken up here at an average of 3,000 a year.
~Erdington.~--Another of the ancient places (named in the Domesday Book
as Hardingtone) surrounding Birmingham and which ranked as high in those
days of old, though now but like one of our suburbs, four miles on the
road to Sutton Coldfield. Erdington Hall, in the reign of Henry II., was
the moated and fortified abode of the family of that name, and their
intermarriages with the De Berminghams, &c., connected them with our
local history in many ways. Though the family, according to Dugdale and
others, had a chapel of their own, the hamlet appertained to the parish
of Aston, to the mother church of which one Henry de Erdington added an
isle, and the family arms long appeared in the heraldic tracery of its
windows. Erdington Church (St. Barnabas) was built in 1823, as a chapel
of ease to Aston, and it was not until 1858 that the district was formed
into a separate and distinct ecclesiastical parish, the vicar of Aston
being the patron of the living.
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