Richard III., “as every schoolboy knows,” marched out from Leicester to defeat and death at Bosworth, but he did not march forth from the Castle, even then dilapidated. He slept—or, as Shakespeare would have it, his guilty conscience refused to let him sleep—the night before the battle at the “Blue Boar” inn. Two days later, his body, flung ignominiously across the back of a horse, was brought back, and exposed publicly to view in the Hall of the Guild of Corpus Christi, and was then buried without any ceremony in the Greyfriars Church. There it remained for fifty years, until the destruction of the religious houses caused the remains of all who lay there to be cast away. Bow Bridge, crossing the river Soar near by, was replaced by the present iron bridge in 1862, and on it may be seen the inscription, “Near this spot lie the remains of Richard III., the last of the Plantagenets.” The Corporation of Leicester has an ancient and honourable history, and has included in the many centuries of its existence a number of public-spirited men. “Many centuries” truly it is that the Corporation has existed, for the time is not known, since Leicester was Leicester, when there was not a Corporation. There was, however, no Mayor, so-styled, until 1251. [Sidenote: _THE OLD TOWN HALL_] The Town Hall that served the purpose from 1563 until 1876, when the great modern building was completed, still stands, hard by St. Martin’s Church, with which in fact it was closely associated, having been originally the home of a religious fraternity—the Corpus Christi Guild. The Mayor’s Parlour, built in the time of Charles the First, panelled with bog oak, remains, as also does the public hall, with timber roof, like a boat reversed. The building was self-contained to the minutest particulars, for adjoining the Parlour where the Worshipful the Mayor took his ease, was, and is, the cell where petty malefactors found what ease they might until justice, as then understood, dealt with them. A very full and complete account might be written of the old Town Hall, for the records concerning it are full and precise, but they lack confirmation of the tradition that Shakespeare himself acted with Richard Burbage’s company of players here. Mayor, aldermen, and common councillors were not averse from merry-making, and we have accounts of the mafficking that took place here to celebrate the defeat of the Armada, when the Town Waits were had into the gallery and discoursed on pipe and tabor, and the town went wild with joy, and fell on each other’s necks and wept, by which it seems that the glories of Mafeking Night in the twentieth century had their counterpart in the sixteenth. And a good thing, too; for when we cease to rejoice in victory we shall be a pitiful folk indeed. What the pro-Spaniards thought of it all is not recorded.