leicester

Leicester is a city, unitary authority and the county town of Leicestershire in the East Midlands of England.

The city lies on the River Soar and close to the eastern end of the National Forest. It is to the north-east of Birmingham and Coventry, south of Nottingham, and west of Peterborough.

The 2016 mid year estimate of the population of the City of Leicester unitary authority was 348,300, an increase of approximately 18,500 ( 5.6%) from the 2011 census figure of 329,839, making it the most populous municipality in the East Midlands region. The associated urban area is also the 11th most populous in England and the 13th most populous in the United Kingdom.

Leicester is at the intersection of two major railway lines—the north–south Midland Main Line and the east/west Birmingham to London Stansted CrossCountry line; as well as the confluence of the M1/M69 motorways and the A6/A46 trunk routes. Leicester is the home to football club Leicester City and rugby club Leicester Tigers.

Name

The name of Leicester comes from Old English. It is first recorded in Latinised form in the early ninth century as Legorensis civitatis and in Old English itself in an Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 924 as Ligera ceastre (and, in various spellings, frequently thereafter). In the Domesday Book of 1086, it is recorded as Ledecestre.

The first element of the name is the name of a people, the Ligore (whose name appears in Ligera ceastre in the genitive plural form); their name came in turn from the river Ligor (now the River Soar), the origin of whose name is uncertain but thought to be from Brittonic (possibly cognate with the name of the Loire).

The second element of the name is the Old English word ceaster ("(Roman) fort, fortification, town", itself borrowed from Latin castrum).

A list of British cities in the ninth-century History of the Britons includes one Cair Lerion; Leicester has been proposed as the place to which this refers (and the Welsh name for Leicester is Caerlŷr). But this identification is not certain.

Based on the Welsh name (given as Kaerleir), Geoffrey of Monmouth proposes a king Leir of Britain as an eponymous founder in his Historia Regum Britanniae (12th century).