This book is the first detailed history and description of the Freemen of Leicester in the eight hundred years of the institution’s existence in its different guises. The result of many years of painstaking research it gives a vivid and often colourful account of the progression of a body of citizens (originally exclusively male; now men and women) in a provincial borough – later to become a city – through the long history of England, moving down the centuries from a medieval autocracy to the democracy we know today. It shows ordinary people resisting the lawless barons and a monarch who attempted to subdue them in the name of his God-given right to rule. Finally this gild of ordinary traders and burghers is subsumed into early modern local government after the Great Reform of 1832, having guided and governed the Borough of Leicester for centuries. On that long route the reader will find riots, skulduggery, bravery, opportunism and honest adherence to principles. The local historian and the student of constitutional history will find many points of interest, from “Morning Speech”, the old Freemen’s parliament, held in St Nicholas churchyard next to Jewry Wall (could this be a vestigial survival from an early post-Roman Leicester?) to the succession of gild moot-houses culminating in the medieval Gildhall.

 

With many illustrations and some excellent maps, this book is never dull and always entertaining and informative.