Qualla: Market Hall Museum, Warwick

Market Hall Museum, Warwick: Introduction

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The bear stands rearing on its hind legs in the entrance hall, paws against a wooden trunk - which is to say it stands exactly in the pose of the Bear and Ragged Staff, the heraldic emblem that has identified Earls of Warwick since at least the fourteenth century. It is a real bear, properly stuffed, occupying the ground floor of the Market Hall the way a county's mascot ought to: visible, slightly absurd, demanding context. The same arrangement of bear and ragged staff appears on the shield of Warwickshire County Council, on the badge of the University of Warwick, and on the kit of Warwickshire County Cricket Club. To enter Warwickshire's museum is to be greeted by Warwickshire's symbol made literal.

Market Hall Museum, Warwick: Built for Stallholders, Not Scholars

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The building was raised in the late seventeenth century to give the market traders of Warwick what their predecessors had lacked: a roof. Booth Hall, the earlier covered market, had been judged insufficient, and so the new Market Hall went up with a wide open-plan ground floor an...

Market Hall Museum, Warwick: Hundreds of Visitors with the Utmost Decorum

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Above the market, in those rented meeting rooms, a different institution was taking shape. The Warwickshire Natural History and Archaeological Society was founded in 1836, advertising for members in the local newspaper and declaring as its primary aim the amassing of zoological, ...

Market Hall Museum, Warwick: A County Takes Over

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Membership of the Society dwindled in the early twentieth century and so did its funds. In March 1932 the Society made what then was an unprecedented decision: it handed the entire collection to Warwickshire County Council. With that gift Warwickshire became the first county coun...

Market Hall Museum, Warwick: What the Collection Holds

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Oisin the Deer is one of the museum's celebrities: the complete skeleton of a Giant Irish Deer, a species with antlers spanning up to four metres across, which stood two metres high at the shoulder when it walked the European plains in the late Pleistocene. He was donated in the ...

Market Hall Museum, Warwick: The Sheldon Tapestry, an Entire Wall

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In the 1580s Ralph Sheldon commissioned a set of tapestry maps for his country house in south Warwickshire. He had four made, each depicting one English county: Worcestershire, Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, and Warwickshire. The Warwickshire tapestry is among the earliest detaile...