The old Town Hall of Leicester, a quaint and composite building of various dates, stands a little to the west of St. Martin's church, in a narrow street called Town Hall Lane. The earliest part of it was erected by the Corpus Christi gild, an important social-religious fraternity which, from the middle of the fourteenth century until its dissolution, was closely, though never officially, connected with the local government of Leicester. Exactly what this association meant, and why the hall eventually came to be purchased by the town in a curiously roundabout way, cannot be understood without some knowledge of the borough constitution between the Norman Conquest and the Reformation. We therefore propose to give, as accurately as we can in a brief summary, such an account of the development of the chief municipal institutions, in the course of that long period, as will make the story of the old hall intelligible.

Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society, 13, 1-72