ULAS
University of Leicester Archaeological Services

Excavations at Westbridge Wharf

'Legecestria is a most wealthy city, and emcompast with an indissoluble wall, of which if the foundation were strong and good, the place would be inferiour to no city whatsever’
Matthew Paris, Lesser History, 13th century, translated by William Camden, 1695

Current re-development of Leicester’s Bath Lane area is providing an opportunity to locate the lost western town defences and present new evidence for their dating and sequence.

For the story of the defences in the post-Roman period one has to turn to documentary evidence, but even this is meagre. The first mention of the defences is the account of the sack of Leicester in 1173 when Henry II ordered the destruction of the castle and town defences. It is generally thought that the damage to the walls would have been localised and limited; the recorded expenditure on the demolition are two payments of only 11s 9d and 40s and there is no mention of any major reconstruction works.

‘That the walls, being faulty in the foundations, when they were undermind, and the props burnt that supported them, fell in great pieces, which remain to this day in the shape of rocks for bigness and solidity; such was the indissoluble tenacity of the morter’
Matthew Paris, Lesser History, describing the sack of Leicester by Henry II in 1173, quoted in William Camden, 1695

The recent excavations revealed a localised area of wall destruction that might be one of these 12th century breaches. The near-contemporary account by Matthew Paris describes how the walls were sapped and then toppled by burning the timber props. At Westbridge wharf the granite footings of the town wall survived intact for most of the length revealed, except for a short stretch. Here there were signs of conflagration with fire reddened earth and fire-cracked foundation stones.

In the 13th century a trench immediately outside of the wall was excavated, filled with rammed stone rubble and capped with stiff clay. It is feasible that the feature was a measure to prevent further sapping in a period of anticipated troubles such as the barons’ war. Immediately adjacent to the line of the town wall, and cutting into the top of the rampart was a large circular lime kiln, with its final charge of partly burnt limestone still intact. It is possible that the kiln was used to produce lime for repairs to the Roman wall. The limestone used in the kiln was from one of two possible locations – Barrow-on-Soar or from the Crown Hills area of Evington.

The west wall appears to have survived until the early post-medieval period when it was completely dismantled leaving only the granite footings. Pottery from the ‘robber trench’ suggest the dismantling occurred around the later 16th century, according with documentary evidence for the sanctioning of stone removal on payment to the town council.

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