Qualla: Market Bosworth

Market Bosworth: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On Saturday 22 March 2015, a black hearse carried a king through Market Bosworth on its way to be buried. Richard III had been dead for 530 years by then, killed two miles south of the town at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, the final and decisive engagement of the Wars of the Roses. His skeleton, rediscovered under a Leicester car park in 2012, was passing through the town it had never quite left in local memory. A floor plaque in front of the war memorial now marks where the cortege paused. It is the kind of detail you only find in places where history is a Sunday outing rather than something kept behind glass.

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Market Bosworth: Bosa's Enclosure

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Bronze Age people lived on this hill before there was anything called England. A Roman villa sat near what is now Barton Road. An Anglo-Saxon village named for a man called Bosa took root here in the eighth century, and bosaworth meant Bosa's enclosure in Old English. When the No...

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Market Bosworth: The Battle a Few Miles South

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On 22 August 1485, Richard III and Henry Tudor brought their armies to the fields just south of the town. By the end of the day Richard was dead, the last English king killed in battle, and Henry was on his way to being crowned Henry VII at Westminster. The Wars of the Roses, a g...

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Market Bosworth: The Dixies and Their Difficult Schoolmaster

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1567 the manor was sold to Sir Wolstan Dixie, Lord Mayor of London, who never bothered to visit the place he owned. His grand-nephew, also Wolstan Dixie, finally moved here in 1608 and got on with the things absentee landlords had not done: building a manor house, laying out a...

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Market Bosworth: Schoolmaster, Poet, Puritan, Murderer

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For a town of 2,097 people, Market Bosworth has produced or educated a striking range of notable inhabitants. Thomas Hooker, born just up the road at Markfield in 1586, would emigrate to America and found the colony of Connecticut. Lady Florence Dixie, born in 1855 to the elevent...

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Market Bosworth: Bloom and the Cattle Market

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The town's cattle market closed in 1996, ending a tradition begun seven centuries earlier under that 1285 royal charter. What survives is more decorative. In 1985, on the 500th anniversary of the battle, Market Bosworth entered the Britain in Bloom competition and decked itself i...

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