to Birmingham town.
This street, as I remember, is called Dirtey (Deritend). In it dwells
smithes and cutlers, and there is a brook that divides this street from
Birmingham, an hamlet, or member, belonging to the parish therebye.

"There is at the end of Dirtey a propper chappel and mansion-house of
timber, (the moat) hard on the ripe, as the brook runneth down; and as I
went through the ford, by the bridge, the water came down on the right
hand, and a few miles below goeth into Tame. This brook, above Dirtey,
breaketh in two arms, that a little beneath the bridge close again. This
brook riseth, as some say, four or five miles above Birmingham, towards
Black-hills.

"The beauty of Birmingham, a good market-town in the extreme parts of
Warwickshire, is one street going up alonge, almost from the left ripe
of the brook, up a meane hill, by the length of a quarter of a mile, I
saw but one parish-church in the town.

"There be many smithes in the town that use to make knives and all
manner of cutting tools, and many loriners that make bittes, and a
great many naylers; so that a great part of the town is maintained by
smithes, who have their iron and sea-coal out of Staffordshire."

Here we find some intelligence, and more mistake, cloathed in the dress
of antique diction, which plainly evinces the necessity of
modern history.

It is matter of surprise that none of those religious drones, the monks,
who hived in the priory for fifteen or twenty generations, ever thought
of indulging posterity with an history of Birmingham. They could not
want opportunity, for they lived a life of indolence; nor materials, for
they were nearer the infancy of time, and were possessed of historical
fads now totally lost. Besides, nearly all the little learning in the
kingdom was possessed by this class of people; and the place, in their
day, must have enjoyed an eminent degree of prosperity.

Though the town has a modern appearance, there is reason to believe it
of great antiquity; my Birmingham reader, therefore, must suffer me to
carry him back into the remote ages of the Ancient Britons to visit his
fable ancestors.

We have no histories of those times but what are left by the Romans, and
these we ought to read with caution, because they were parties in the
dispute. If two antagonists write each his own history, the discerning
reader will sometimes draw the line of justice between them; but where
there is only one, partiality is expe