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1689 - 1907
The Riland & The Bedford Family
Five generations of one family in the living of Sutton Coldfield
For 218 years the rectory of Sutton Coldfield stayed inside one family. From 1689 to 1907 the living of Holy Trinity passed from Riland to Riland and then to Riland Bedford, each rector in a position to name the man who followed him.
That was not an accident of favour. In 1706 the first John Riland bought the advowson - the right to present the next rector - from the impoverished Shilton family. The purchase turned a valuable parish appointment into something the family could hand on, and hand it on they did, through sons, grandsons and, in the end, a change of surname.
It matters to the cricket club because the ground came with the living. Rectory Park was the rectory's glebe land, and the man who laid a cricket ground out on it in 1847 was the rector's family's own. The club was founded on land its founder's forebears had been mapping, planting and fishing for the better part of a century.
The Family Line
Eight rectors, one family, and the advowson that kept the living in their hands.
1689-1720
John Riland
The first of the line
Became Rector in 1689. In 1706 he bought the advowson of the parish from the Shilton family, putting the appointment of every future rector into his family's hands. In 1701 he had already pulled down the old medieval rectory and commissioned the local architect William Wilson to build a Queen Anne manor house in its place, standing in several acres of parkland - the park the club plays in today.
1720-1757
Richard Riland
Son of John
1757-1790
Richard Bisse Riland
Grandson of John
Appointed to Holy Trinity in 1757, a position he held until his death in 1790. The glebe land came with the living. In 1761 he commissioned the surveyor John Snape to map it - the earliest document the club holds.
1790-1822
John Riland
Brother of Richard Bisse
The evangelical clergyman of the family.
1822-1843
William Riland Bedford
Grandson of Richard Bisse Riland
The surname changes here, and the living carries on regardless.
1843-1850
No rector recorded
The club's Part 1 record names no rector for these years - the years in which the cricket club was founded.
1850-1892
William Kirkpatrick Riland Bedford
Son of William
The club's founder and its first President. In 1889 he published Three Hundred Years of a Family Living, a history of his own family in the parish.
1892-1907
William C. Riland Bedford
The last of the line
The final member of the family to hold the living.
Sutton Rectory, from the plates of Rev. W.K.R. Bedford's own book - the house that gave Rectory Park its name, with the cricket lawn in front of it.
The House in the Park
The medieval rectory came down in 1701. In its place the first John Riland had the local architect William Wilson build a Queen Anne manor house, set in several acres of parkland behind what is now the Boot public house.
It stood for more than two centuries before it was demolished in 1936. The parkland around it kept the name it had always had - the Rectory's park - and that is the name the cricket ground carries still.
"A Map of the Glebe Land belonging to the Rectory of Sutton Coldfield in the County of Warwick. Surveyed for the Revd. Mr Riland, Rector, by Jn. Snape. 1761."
Mapping the Glebe
In 1761 Richard Bisse Riland engaged John Snape, a prominent local surveyor, to map the rectory's glebe land. Two sheets survive between them, every parcel named and measured in acres, roods and perches.
The map shows the Queen Anne rectory standing where the park is now, and between the two sheets they index twenty features of the estate - the Mansion House, the Parsonage House, the Church, the Green Ponds, the Great Pond, the Mill, the Brewhouse, the Orchard, the Garden, the Nursery, the Bridge, the Common. Among them, a Bowling Green. Games were being played on the Rector's land eighty-six years before a cricket ground was laid out on it.
The Fish Pond and the Lime Avenue
Close by the rectory the rector had a large pond dug for keeping meat fish - carp and the like - to be taken as they were wanted. The Rectory Fish Pond is still there today, at the end of the short track that runs alongside the Boot.
He also planted a grand avenue of lime trees. It was a piece of deliberate design as much as planting: from his own front door the rector could look straight up the avenue to his parish church on the top of the hill.
Why it matters to the club
When the railways took the field Sutton's cricketers had been using, the ground they moved to was not bought, rented or petitioned for. It was the rector's own glebe, laid out for cricket by a rector's son whose family had held that land since before anyone alive could remember.
The club was founded in 1847 under the shadow of the rectory, and the parsonage became the hub around which its early activity turned. Six decades of Bedford leadership followed. The family's hold on the parish ended in 1907; the club it started is still playing on the glebe.