=St. Martin’s.=--We find that the earliest mention of the mother church of St. Martin in our national records is a licence of the 6th of May, 1330 (4 Edward III.), to Walter de Clodeshale, of Saltley (then an adjoining hamlet), to grant lands for the endowment of a priest to say mass daily at the altar of the Virgin in St. Martin’s. Seventeen years afterwards (21 Edward III.), Richard, son of Walter de Clodeshale, obtained a licence for a further grant to endow a second priest to say daily mass. In 1392 (16 Richard II.), there is a record of a licence to found and endow a guild in honour of The Holy Cross, and another chantry in St. Martin’s for two chaplains. All these charities were suppressed at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries. The endowments of the Clodeshale charities were sold,[34] as was also a small part of the endowments of the Guild of the Holy Cross. The rest were re-granted by Edward VI. for the foundation and endowment of the Grammar School. For three centuries after its foundation St. Martin’s Church must have been nearly at the top of the town, which consisted, as Leland saw it even in 1538, of one long street, namely, the present Digbeth and High Street, and the old church sufficed for all its wants, especially as the lower part of the town below Digbeth was served by the chapel of St. John, noticed under Aston parish.[35] The tower and spire, having become unsafe, were taken down and rebuilt in 1855, and in 1872 the rebuilding of the rest of the church was commenced, and it was finished and re-consecrated on the 20th of July, 1875. Attached to the church are mission rooms in Barwick Street and Park Street. The original parish has been, by the successive agencies of special acts of parliament, the orders of the Church Building Commissioners (1818 to 1856), and afterwards of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, or by the Bishop in exercise of powers given by 1 and 2, W. IV., c. 38 (now repealed), divided into five rectories and twenty-one vicarages (all incumbents of churches entitled to perform marriages, churchings, and baptisms, and receive the fees for their own use, being now termed vicars under the statute 31 and 32 Vic., c. 117). The successive divisions are detailed in chronological order.