Leicester ( )"Leicester. ". Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Retrieved 28 August 2015. is a city, unitary authority area, and the county town of Leicestershire, in the East Midlands of England. It is the largest city in the East Midlands, with a population of in . The greater Leicester urban area had a population of 559,017 in 2021, making it the 11th most populous in England, and the 13th most populous in the United Kingdom. For three years running, the annual Good Growth for Cities Index has ranked Leicester as the best place to live and work in the East Midlands. The latest study, which is based on a range of economic factors, rated Leicester as the best performing city in the East Midlands in 2024 and 20th overall out of 52 other UK cities.
The city lies on the River Soar and is approximately north-northwest of London, east-northeast of Birmingham and northeast of Coventry. Nottingham and Derby lie around to the north and northwest respectively, whilst Peterborough is located to the east. Leicester is close to the eastern end of the National Forest.
Leicester has a long history extending into ancient times. The site of an Iron Age oppidum, it developed into the Roman town of Ratae Corieltauvorum following the conquest. The ruins of Ratae were later settled by the Anglo-Saxons, and then captured by the Vikings who made it one of the Five Boroughs of the Danelaw. After the Norman Conquest the town came under the authority of the Beaumont and De Montfort Earls, most notably the famous rebel Simon de Montfort. After his death in 1265 the town passed to the House of Lancaster and Leicester Castle became one of their strongholds, a royal residence when the family came to the throne in 1399. Leicester therefore became an important town in the wider nation, the meeting place of the parliaments of 1318, 1414, and 1450, and a place frequently visited by the King and his court. Most famously King Richard III spent his last days in the town before his death at the Battle of Bosworth and was buried there in August 1485. In the Early Modern era Puritanism flourished in Leicester and the town was a supporter of the Parliamentarian cause in the Civil War. In the Victorian age the town became known for its hosiery and shoe manufacturing industries. It also rapidly expanded in population and size eventually gaining city status in 1919. Since the mid-20th century, immigration from countries of the British Commonwealth has seen Leicester become an ethnically diverse city, and one of the largest urban centres of the Midlands.
Leicester is at the intersection of two railway lines: the Midland Main Line and the Birmingham to London Stansted Airport line. It is also at the confluence of the M1/M69 motorways and the A6/A46 trunk routes. Leicester Cathedral is home to the new tomb of Richard III who was reburied in the cathedral in 2015 after being discovered nearby in the foundations of the lost Greyfriars chapel, more than 500 years after his death. In sporting terms, the city of Leicester is home to football club Leicester City, rugby club Leicester Tigers, basketball team Leicester Riders, the Leicester City Hockey Club, and the Leicestershire County Cricket Club. In 1996, a statue was erected in the city centre to commemorate the success of the city's sporting teams in this year. In 2016, Leicester was named as the UK's Greatest Sporting City, and in 2008, it was named as a European City of Sport.
Name The name of Leicester comes from Old English. It is first recorded in Latinised form in the early ninth century as Legorensis civitatis and in Old English itself in an Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 924 as (and, in various spellings, frequently thereafter). In the Domesday Book of 1086, it is recorded as .The Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names Based on the Collections of the English Place-Name Society, ed. by Victor Watts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), s.v. LEICESTER, LEIRE.
The first element of the name is the name of a people, the Ligore (whose name appears in Ligera ceastre in the genitive plural form); their name came in turn from the river Ligor (now the River Soar), the origin of whose name is uncertain but thought to be from Brittonic (possibly cognate with the name of the Loire). citing Wilford, Asiatick Researches vol. ii. No. 2 (1812), p. 45: "The learned Somner says that the river which runs by it [Leicester] was formerly called Leir by the same contraction [from Legora], and it is probably the river Liar of the anonymous geographer. Mr. Somner, if I be not mistaken, places the original own of Ligora near the source of the Lear, now the Soar".Gelling et al. (eds.), The names of towns and cities in Britain, B. T. Batsford, 1970, p. 122.Thompson (1849), Appendix B: Leograceaster—The Saxon Name of Leicester, pp. 448 f. ; Thompson (1849), pp. 7 f .
The second element of the name is the Old English word ceaster ("(Roman) fort, fortification, town", itself borrowed from Latin castrum).
A list of British cities in the ninth-century History of the Britons includes one ; Leicester has been proposed as the place to which this refers (and the Welsh name for Leicester is ). But this identification is not certain.Andrew Breeze, 'Historia Brittonum' and Britain’s Twenty-Eight Cities ', Journal of Literary Onomastics, 5.1 (2016), 1–16 (p. 9).
Based on the Welsh name (given as Kaerleir), Geoffrey of Monmouth proposed a king Leir of Britain as an eponymous founder in his Historia Regum Britanniae (12th century).Geoffrey, Vol. II, Ch. 11.
History
Prehistory Leicester is one of the oldest cities in England, with a history going back at least two millennia.W. G. Hoskins, "Leicester" History Today (Sep 1951) 1#9 pp 48–56. The native Iron Age settlement encountered by the Romans at the site seems to have developed in the 2nd or 1st centuries BC, around a century or so before the arrival of the Romans. Little is known about this settlement or the condition of the River Soar at this time, although roundhouses excavated from this era seem to have clustered along roughly of the east bank of the Soar. This area of the Soar was split into two channels: a main stream to the east and a narrower channel on the west, with a presumably marshy island between. The settlement seems to have controlled a ford across the larger channel. The later Roman name was a latinate form of the Brittonic word for "ramparts" (cf. Gaelic rath and the nearby villages of Ratby and Ratcliffe), suggesting the site was an oppidum. The plural form of the name suggests it was initially composed of several villages.Thompson (1849), Appendix A: Ratæ—Roman Leicester, pp. 443 ff . The Celtic tribe holding the area was later recorded as the "Coritanians" but an inscription recovered in 1983 showed this to have been a corruption of the original "Corieltauvians". The Corieltauvians may have ruled over roughly the area of the East Midlands.
Roman
It is believed that the Romans arrived in the Leicester area around AD 47, during their conquest of southern Britain. The Corieltauvian settlement lay near a bridge on the Fosse Way, a Roman road between the legionary camps at Isca (Exeter) and Lindum (Lincoln). It remains unclear whether the Romans fortified and garrisoned the location, but it slowly developed from around the year 50 onwards as the tribal capital of the Corieltauvians under the name Ratae Corieltauvorum. In the 2nd century, it received a forum and bathhouse. In 2013, the discovery of a Roman cemetery found just outside the old city walls and dating back to AD 300 was announced. The remains of the baths of Roman Leicester can be seen at the Jewry Wall; recovered artifacts are displayed at the adjacent museum.
Medieval
Knowledge of the town following the Roman withdrawal from Britain is limited. It seems to have been continually occupied after Roman protection ceased through the 5th and 6th centuries, although with a significantly reduced population. Its memory was preserved as the Nennius ().
Theodor Mommsen (). Historia Brittonum, VI. Composed after AD 830. Hosted at Latin Wikisource. of the History of the Britons.Ford, David Nash. "The 28 Cities of Britain " at Britannia. 2000. Following the Saxon invasion of Britain, Leicester was occupied by the Middle Angles and subsequently administered by the kingdom of Mercia. It was elevated to a bishopric in either 679 or 680; this see survived until the 9th century, when Leicester was captured by Danish Vikings. Their settlement became one of the Five Burghs of the Danelaw, although this position was short-lived. The Saxon bishop, meanwhile, fled to Dorchester-on-Thames and Leicester did not become a bishopric again until the parish church of became Leicester Cathedral in 1927. The settlement was recorded under the name Ligeraceaster in the early 10th century.
Following the Norman conquest, Leicester was recorded by William's Domesday Book as Ledecestre. It was noted as a city (civitas) but lost this status in the 11th century owing to power struggles between the Church and the aristocracy and did not become a legal city again until 1919.
Geoffrey of Monmouth composed his History of the Kings of Britain around the year 1136, naming a King Leir as an eponymous founder figure.Galfridus Monemutensis [Geoffrey of Monmouth]. Historia Regum Britanniæ. . J.A. Giles & al. (trans.) as History of the Kings of Britain, Vol. II, Ch. 11 in Six Old English Chronicles. 1842. Hosted at Wikisource. According to Geoffrey's narrative, Cordelia had buried her father beneath the river in a chamber dedicated to Janus and his feast day was an annual celebration.Geoffrey of Monmouth. Lewis Thorpe (trans.) as The History of the Kings of Britain, pp. 81 & 86. Harmondsworth, 1966. William Shakespeare took the name of his King Lear from Geoffrey; there is now a statue of the final scene of Shakespeare's Lear in Watermead Country Park.Paul A. Biggs, Sandra Biggs, Leicestershire & Rutland Walks with Children, Sigma Leisure, 2002, p. 44.
When Simon de Montfort became Earl of Leicester in 1231, he gave the borough a grant to expel the Jewish populationMundill (2002), p265 "in my time or in the time of any of my heirs to the end of the world". He justified his action as being "for the good of my soul, and for the souls of my ancestors and successors".Maddicott 1996, p.15.Harris 2008, pp. 128–133. Leicester's Jews were allowed to move to the eastern suburbs, which were controlled by de Montfort's great-aunt and rival, Margaret, Countess of Winchester, after she took advice from the scholar and cleric Robert Grosseteste, at that time Archdeacon of Leicester.Levy 1902, pp. 38–39. It would appear, however, that the expulsion was largely effective, and there is no evidence of any Jews remaining in Leicester. De Montfort's acts of anti-Jewish persecution in Leicester and elsewhere were part of a wider pattern that led to the expulsion of the Jewish population from England in 1290.See Mundill (2002).