Lease Lane.—­Apparently a corruption of Lea or Leay Lane, an ancient bye-road running at the back of the Dog or Talbot Inn, the owners of which, some 300 years ago, were named Leays.  When the Market Hall was built and sewers were laid round it, the workmen came upon what was at the time imagined to be an underground passage, leading from the Guildhall in New Street to the old Church of St. Martin’s.  Local antiquarians at the time would appear to have been conspicuous by their absence, as the workmen were allowed to close the passage with rubbish without a proper examination being made of it.  Quite lately, however, in digging out the soil for the extension of the Fish Market at a point on the line of Lease Lane, about 60ft. from Bell Street, the workmen, on reaching a depth of 8ft. or 9ft., struck upon the same underground passage, but of which the original purpose was not very apparent.  Cut in the soft, sandstone, and devoid of any lining, it ran almost at right angles to Lease Lane, and proved to extend half way under that thoroughfare, and some four or five yards into the excavated ground.  Under Lease Lane it was blocked by rubbish, through which a sewer is believed to run, and therefore the exact ending of the passage in one direction cannot be traced; in the excavated ground it ended, on the site of a dismantled public-house, in a circular shaft, which may have been that of a well, or that of a cesspool.  The passage, so far as it was traceable, was 24ft. long, 7ft. high, and 4-1/2ft. wide.  As to its use before it was severed by the sewerage of Lease Lane, the conjecture is that it afforded a secret means of communication between two houses separated above ground by that thoroughfare, but for what purpose must remain one of the perplexing puzzles of the past.  That it had no connection with the Church or the Grammar School (the site of the old Guild House) is quite certain, as the course of the passage was in a different direction.

Leasing Wives.—­In the histories of sundry strange lands we read of curious customs appertaining to marriage and the giving in marriage.  Taking a wife on trial is the rule of more than one happy clime, but taking a wife upon lease is quite a Brummagem way of marrying (using the term in the manner of many detractors of our town’s fair fame).  In one of the numbers of the Gentleman’s Magazine, for the year 1788, Mr. Sylvanus Urban, as the editor has always been called, is addressed as follows by a Birmingham correspondent:—­“Since my residing in this town I have often heard there is a method of obtaining a wife’s sister upon lease.  I never could learn the method to be taken to get a wife upon lease, or whether such connections are sanctioned by law; but there is an eminent manufacturer in the vicinity of this town who had his deceased wife’s sister upon lease for twenty years and upwards; and I know she went by his name, enjoyed all the privileges, and received all the honours due to the respectable name of wife.”  A rarer case of marital leasing has often been noted against us by the aforesaid smirchers of character as occurring in 1853, but in reality it was rather an instance of hiring a husband.