=The Priory.=--The Hospital or Priory of St. Thomas the Apostle has had its name and site preserved by the names “Upper and Lower Priory,” “Minories,” &c., but the exact site of the buildings and the date of the foundation are uncertain. The grounds occupied a large space along Bull Street, Dale End, John Street, and Steelhouse Lane; but even in the recent excavations for new streets scarcely a fragment has been found. A century ago the pseudo-antiquarian William Hutton, who did his best to write a History of Birmingham, records that in 1775 he removed “twenty waggon loads of old stones, great numbers of which were highly finished in the Gothic taste; parts of porticos, windows, arches, ceilings--some fluted, some ciphered, yet complete as the day they left the chisel,” and that after letting the builders destroy the greater portion, he used some in making a fire-place in “an under-ground kitchen.” There is little hope now of finding any of these relics or of settling the site on which the Priory buildings stood. Even Dugdale failed to find its origin, and simply records that the first mention occurs in 13 Edwd. I. (1285), and that the Commissioners of Henry VIII. (1545) valued it at £8. 8s. 10d., and that it was duly dissolved. =St. Martin’s Church.=--The Mother Church, St. Martin’s, claims great antiquity, but its exact date has not been found. During the recent restoration some early wall-paintings were discovered, with the still more valuable remains which formed part of a Norman Church, very evidently on the same site, but all traces of whose history have been lost. The existing Church has, however, some highly interesting monuments of some of the de Berminghams of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, one in alabaster, representing an ecclesiastic, being well known as an almost unique example of fifteenth century art. The present restored church has replaced an ugly brick casing which covered the decaying portion of an earlier church supposed to have been of the latter part of the thirteenth century with later alterations. The Registers begin in 1555, and have been carefully preserved, as well as various Church Books which have been used in the History of St. Martin’s by Mr. J. Thackray Bunce.