or garden lying on the north of Dead Lane, once occupied by Alderman William Morton. This house is stated by Miss Bateson to have been the original "stock house," or store house, which was once used to contain the Borough stores of coal and other materials. The Borough store house, however, to which she refers, was situated in the Saturday Market, and not at the High Cross. Another house belonging to the community which was used as a store house was in the Holy Bones, near the Mayor's Hall. But there was "a Barne in the Ded Lane called the store howse," which belonged in 1525 to the Corpus Christi Guild, and was then "in dekey." If Morton's house took its name from any "stock house," which seems doubtful, it may have derived it from this barn.
The Wednesday Market, which was held from time immemorial at the High Cross, seems to have extended north during Elizabethan times, and in Speed's map of 1610 all that part of the High Street which lay between the Cross and the North Gate was designated "The Wednesday Market."
Leading East out of the High Street, below St. John's Hospital, and under the southern wall of its garden, was St. John's Lane, afterwards called Gaol Lane, or Bridewell Lane, and now known as Causeway Lane.
A few yards farther down, a lane left the High Street on the same side, which is described in a Coroner's Roll of 1303 as "venella que se extendit ab alta strata versus ecclesiam S. Petri et versus Torchemer," the lane stretching from the High Street towards St. Peter's Church and towards Torchmere. Nichols quotes a deed of 1586, which describes Torchmere as the old name of the Queen's Highway, "near to a place there where formerly stood a cross." It seems to have been named after a pond or watercourse, which at one time lay there, for in 1278 a man was fined for washing fells in Torchmere. The name also occurs in the form "Torchesmere," and may mean the pool where "torches" (i.e., great mullein flowers) grow, as "Blabbs Mill," near Castle Bromwich, took its name from the May-blobs that flourish by the Mill pool. Torchmere seems to have been part of the long, winding highway which is
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