---

 

 

 

Worcester Leasing

Did You Know?

As well as the sauce, and, yes, Royal Worcester porcelain and the splendid cathedral where King John of Magna Carta fame is buried, Worcester is also renowned as the home of composer Edward Elgar and the site of the final battle of the English Civil War.

Worcestershire was constituted as a county around 927, as the Kingdom of England formed. During the High Middle Ages the county was the site of the Battle of Evesham, in which Simon de Montfort was defeated, and in 1651 the Battle of Worcester was the last major engagement of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.

Worcester Castle was a Norman fortification built between 1068 and 1069 in Worcester, England by Urse d'Abetot on behalf of William the Conqueror. The castle had a motte-and-bailey design and was located on the south side of the old Anglo-Saxon city,

NOT a lot of people may know this, but Worcester can lay a very decent claim to being the oldest inhabited settlement in the UK. Its history stretches back around 5,000 years and even as recently as the late 1600s it was the largest town in the Midlands.

The mighty River Severn is Britain's longest river. It runs from the Welsh mountains, through the beautiful Shropshire and Worcestershire countryside and down to the flatlands of the Severn estuary.

Worcester was a Roman 'small town' which may have been called Vertis, meaning 'a bend in the river'. The town stood at a junction of the Roman roads which linked Worcester with Droitwich, and the fort at Kingsholme near Gloucester to that at Wroxeter near Shropshire.

Is there a king buried in Worcester Cathedral - King John is buried in a place of honour in front of the High Altar. His tomb features the Plantaganet badge of three lions (or strictly leopards!), and has the oldest royal effigy in England. John's son, Henry III visited his father's tomb and became an important benefactor of the Cathedral.

Worcester was also a centre of medieval religious life; there were several monasteries until the dissolution. These included the Greyfriars, Blackfriars, Penitent Sisters and the Benedictine Priory, now Worcester Cathedral. 

Royal Worcester, a revered porcelain company, was created in 1751 by Doctor John Wall and a group of local businessmen. One of their first product lines was the Worcester porcelain, painted in blue under the glaze.

Why did King John want to be buried in Worcester? - It's not known why exactly John wanted to be buried at Worcester, but this is where he willed that his body would lie. In 1216 King John didn't exactly leave the country in a stable state for his son to continue to rule, and so Henry III had to wait to commission work on his father's tomb.

Worcester is the home of the world-famous Worcestershire Sauce invented by British chemists (pharmacists) John Wheeley Lea and William Henry Perrins. Inspiration for the sauce is said to come from Bengal in India.

According to some researchers, it looks like the world-famous English playwright, William Shakespeare, was married to Anne Hathaway in Worcester. At the time, Stratford-upon-Avon was part of Worcestershire, and it is highly likely that the couple were married at St Martins in Worcester.