This site was produced by: LOCAL AUTHORITY PUBLISHING
Publishers for local authorities throughout Great Britain. View more Official Guides at www.officialguides.co.uk

Although situated in the very centre of Roman England and within walking distance of the intersection of the Fosse Way and Watling Street at High Cross, it seems likely that Lutterworth was first settled by the Anglo-Saxons. It was suggested by Sir Thomas Cave in the eighteenth century that the name "Lutters Vortig" means Luthers Farm and the original settlement is thought likely to have been on or near the site of the present parish church. The settlement, facing south and overlooking the fertile Swift Valley, had prospered by the time of the Norman Conquest, enough to make it a fitting reward for one of the Conqueror’s minor followers. The Domesday Book of 1086 records that “Maino the Breton held in Lutresurde 13 Carucates with 3 Ploughs in the demesne, 2 Servants and a Maid Servant and here were 7 Villeins, 7 Bordars and 12 Socmen with 4 Ploughs and 12 Acres of meadow”.

In 1268 the de Verduns founded the Hospital of St. John the Baptist on the southern bank of the River Swift near the present motorway junction. This was not a hospital in the modern sense but a hostel where a priest and “six poor men” (who were inmates) were established to provide hospitality for poor travellers. The Hospital was dissolved by Henry VIII and all traces of it have long since disappeared.

In the Fourteenth Century the manor of Lutterworth passed to another of Leicestershire’s great landowning dynasties, the Ferrers of Groby, and thence by marriage to the Grey family. Sir John Grey was killed leading a Lancastrian charge at the second Battle of St. Albans in 1461, leaving a widow and two young sons. The widow Elizabeth Woodville, went on to marry the Yorkist King Edward IV, thus becoming the mother of the Princes in the Tower and the grandmother of Henry Vlll. Her eldest son by her first marriage, Thomas Grey, was created Marquess of Dorset in 1475.

As well as causing much official displeasure by his illegal enclosure of common land in the Lutterworth area, the first Marquess also began work on the hunting lodge at Bradgate, in the north of the county which was one of the wonders of early Tudor architecture. His grandson, the third Marquess, married Henry Vlll’s niece Frances Brandon and ultimately inherited her father’s title as Duke of Suffolk. Their eldest daughter was Jane Grey, the tragic Nine Days Queen, who was beheaded. In January 1554, six months after Jane’s overthrow by the rightful Queen, Mary l, Suffolk decamped from London to his manor house at Lutterworth on his way to try and raise Leicester and Coventry to rebellion, for which treachery he lost his head.

Despite its proximity to the battlefield at Naseby, Lutterworth seems to have played only a peripheral role in the Civil War of the next century. The church plate was looted by Lord Hastings’ royalist troops in January 1644 and the Rector, Dr. Tovey, was deprived of his living for supporting the King’s cause. It was during this period, however, that the last of Lutterworth’s great landowning families, the Feildings, rose to prominence, becoming Earls of Denbigh in 1622. The Earl of Denbigh was killed in battle, fighting on the side of King Charles. His eldest son, Basil Feilding, was one of Cromwell’s finest Generals and Cromwell allowed Basil to keep the Earldom. When Charles II returned to the throne, he also allowed Basil to keep it because his father had fought and died for Charles I.

The link with the Feildings lives on through the “Denbigh Arms” which was one of Lutterworth’s Georgian coaching inns, together with the “Hind” and the “Greyhound”. From roughly 1750 to 1850 the town was an important posting station for stage coaches on the London to Chester turnpike. By 1840 a horse drawn omnibus was transporting Lutterworthians to the nearest railway station at Ullesthorpe, on the Midland Line from Leicester to Rugby with connections to London and Birmingham. In 1899 the Great Central Railway - “The Last Main Line to London” - linked Sheffield and Leicester to the capital and Lutterworth gained a station of its own to the east of the town.

Sadly both railway lines closed in the 1960s, although part of the Great Central embankment remains as a public walkway and a pleasant reminder of this particular chapter in the town’s long history. Almost simultaneously the M1 reached Lutterworth and opened up the future.