Families of Leicestershire & Rutland
Bosworth Field, Charnwood Forest, the Soar valley, and England's smallest historic county.
Tap a region of the map to see who held it.
Families seated in Leicestershire & Rutland
- WardThe watchman.
- ColemanColumban saint-name or Nicholas' man.
- SpencerThe steward, from pantry to peerage.
- PalmerThe palm-bearer, pilgrimage turned patronymic.
- HaynesHainaut or hedged field, context splits.
- TiceThe German, a Norman byname for an incomer.
- BurtonThe fortified farmstead, a name from a hundred villages.
- SuttonThe south farmstead.
Historic ties to Leicestershire & Rutland
Families with historic but not core ground here.
Champions made here
Famous bearers whose lives or work root in Leicestershire & Rutland.
- Guy GibsonThe Lancaster pilot who led 617 Squadron over the Möhne and Eder dams in May 1943 and won the Victoria Cross at twenty-four.
- Graham ChapmanThe Leicester doctor who joined Monty Python instead of medicine, played King Arthur and Brian, and was the first British television figure to come out publicly as gay.
- Henry Walter BatesThe Leicester hosier's apprentice who spent eleven years collecting beetles on the upper Amazon, came home with fourteen thousand species new to science, and described in 1862 the mimicry mechanism that gave Darwinian evolution its first independent field-evidence.
- Julian BarnesThe Leicester French-teacher's son who worked through literary journalism and the OED, wrote Flaubert's Parrot, and won the 2011 Booker Prize for The Sense of an Ending.
- Sir David AttenboroughThe Leicester-raised natural-history broadcaster whose Life on Earth (1979), The Living Planet (1984), Trials of Life (1990), Blue Planet (2001) and Planet Earth (2006) defined the modern television documentary and brought the natural world to the largest audience any broadcaster has assembled in the history of the medium.
- George FoxThe Leicestershire weaver's son whose climb of Pendle Hill in 1652 produced the vision of a great people to be gathered, and whose preaching and organisation through the next four decades built the Religious Society of Friends into a worldwide Christian fellowship that has continued in unbroken meeting since.
Stories told here
Legends set in Leicestershire & Rutland, from any family that carries them.