Wigginshill did not become part of Sutton Coldfield until 1125, when the Earl of Warwick succeeded King Henry I as lord of the manor. Listed as “Winchicelle” in the Domesday Book of 1086, it was a small settlement, with its three open fields of three yardlands (100 acres) each. Although the open fields, Henne Field, Greaves Field and Wigginshill Field, belonged to Wigginshill, one of them, Henne Field, lay over the border in Curdworth Parish.
Wigginshill, which lies half-way between the Kingsley pub on Kingsbury Road and the Cock Inn at Wishaw, is not far from Curdworth Church, and so it was easier to go to Church at Curdworth than to trudge all the way to the parish church in Sutton. The Abbot of Leicester was the patron of Curdworth church in the thirteenth century, and he argued that the Rector of Sutton should give up the tithes of Wigginshill to him, since the inhabitants of Wigginshill went to Curdworth for all their spiritual needs.
The Rector of Sutton, and his patron the Earl of Warwick, had no intention of giving up any of their income, so the Abbot of Leicester appealed to higher authority. A decision in favour of the Abbot would set a precedent undermining the whole system of parishes and tithes, and so the buck was passed all the way up to the Pope. The Pope’s legal advisers found a compromise - Wigginshill folk would henceforth render their Easter duty and some other sacraments at Sutton church, but could use Curdworth for more everyday worship; one third of the Wigginshill tithes would go to Curdworth, and two thirds to Sutton.
The population of Wigginshill declined during the middle ages, and by the 1680s there were only three or four houses there. One of the householders converted to Quakerism, and his house was being used for Quaker meetings in 1686. The Sutton and Wishaw Quaker meetings combined with the Wigginshill meeting to buy a cottage, garden and orchard at Wigginshill in 1711, where a meeting house was built in 1724. In the late eighteenth century it was fashionable for Birmingham Quaker couples to be married at Wigginshill, but the meeting house closed down in 1830.
