In 1889 and 1890, W.S.B. (possibly W. Salt Brassington) wrote a series of articles for the Moseley Parish Magazine. He called them Scraps about Moseley. I may not have got the months of publication correct, as the articles were stuck into a parish log book, now in the Archives of the Moseley Local History Society, and the dates were ambiguous.
Assuming that the subscribers to the Parish Magazine are interested in the past as well as in the present affairs of the Parish, we propose to publish from time to time Notes and Scraps of information, gleaned from many sources, relating to the history of the district, and as a fitting commencement we give a translation of a passage in England's greatest national record, ‘Domesday Book’.
One of the most distinguished historians of our own times is of the opinion that the value of the Domesday Survey, as an historical monument, cannot be over-rated. It is a map and picture of England at a moment at which a map and picture are unusually precious. Domesday tells us by whom every acre of land was held in the later days of William, and also by whom it was held in the days of Edward the Confessor. Small and insignificant as Moseley was in those days its name is not omitted.
The word “Domesday” is derived from the Saxon “dom”; the great book of Saxon Laws was called the Dymboc, meaning the judgment book, and in the word “domesman” i.e., an umpire, the first syllable has much the same signification. We read in Wicliffe's Bible, A.D. 1380, “And Jesus stood before the Domesman, and the justise axide Him and said ‘Art Thou King of Jewis?’ ”
Domesday Book, the great survey of England, was made by order of William the Conqueror, A.D. 1086. In the portion of the Survey that relates to Worcestershire, under the head of “The King’s Land” we read “King William holds Bromsgrove (Bremesgrive) in demesne, i.e. in actual possession. Included in Bromsgrove manor there are 18 hamlets of which Muselie and Norton (Moseley and King’s Norton) are two. In the time of King Edward the Confessor, Earl Edwin held this manor.”
So far as we are at present aware this is the first appearance of the name of our village in any public record. Respecting the derivation, it has been suggested that the original name was Mouseley or Mousefield, and that the name, as written in the Domesday Book, is a Latinised form, mus being the Latin for mouse. Another derivation is Mossley, or Mossfield, but the former seems the more probable. Anciently Moseley near Wolverhampton was written Molesley.