Qualla: Leicester Castle

Leicester Castle: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NotFromUtrecht, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1426 the parliament of England sat in the Great Hall of Leicester Castle. It is remembered as the Parliament of Bats - not the flying mammal, but the cudgel. Henry VI was four years old. The kingdom was being run by an uneasy coalition of his uncles, and feeling among the lords was bad enough that they had been forbidden to bring swords to the assembly. They came with bats instead, hidden under their cloaks, ready to use if necessary. Leicester was chosen because London felt unsafe. The Great Hall served. The bats stayed, mostly, in the cloaks. England survived another year of the slow drift toward the Wars of the Roses. Nine and a half centuries earlier, the Romans had walled this same patch of ground in the southwestern corner of their town. The Normans built a castle over the Roman walls. Successive medieval rebuildings layered a Great Hall, a church, gateways, and a steep earthen motte onto the same site. Then the law moved in, and stayed for five hundred years.

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Image: NotFromUtrecht | CC BY-SA 3.0

Leicester Castle: A Norman Mound on Roman Foundations

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NotFromUtrecht, CC BY-SA 3.0. The castle was built around 1070, a few years after the Norman Conquest, under the governorship of Hugh de Grandmesnil. The original earth motte stood 40 feet high - taller than it looks today, smoothed by centuries of weather and erosion. Robert de Beaumont, Count of Meulan, was...

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Image: NotFromUtrecht | CC BY-SA 3.0

Leicester Castle: A Royal Residence, Briefly

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter_Glyn, CC0. By the late 13th and 14th centuries the castle had become a place where kings stopped on their travels. Edward I stayed in 1300; Edward II in 1310 and 1311. John of Gaunt - the fourth son of Edward III, Duke of Lancaster, and one of the most powerful men in 14th-century England -...

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Image: Peter_Glyn | CC0

Leicester Castle: Gun Loops and a Reporter Named Barrie

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ashley Dace, CC BY-SA 2.0. Two unexpected episodes punctuate the castle's long courthouse career. In May 1645, during the English Civil War, Royalist forces under King Charles I and his nephew Prince Rupert of the Rhine besieged and captured Parliamentarian Leicester. A section of the castle wall adjacent ...

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Image: Ashley Dace | CC BY-SA 2.0

Leicester Castle: Queen Anne Skin, Medieval Bones

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NotFromUtrecht, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Great Hall continued to serve as a courtroom until 1981, when Leicester Crown Court finally relocated to new premises on Wellington Street. That makes the castle's hall one of the longest-running judicial venues in English history - functioning as a court for roughly five cen...

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Image: NotFromUtrecht | CC BY-SA 3.0