Northampton nearly had England's third university before Oxford and Cambridge
In 1261 Henry III granted Northampton a university by royal charter. Had it lasted, it would rank behind only Oxford and Cambridge in age. Four years later the king shut it down, after some of its members backed Simon de Montfort's rebellion and it was judged a threat to Oxford's scholarly dominance.
The town mattered enormously in medieval England because it sat near the centre of the country, a handy meeting point for kings and nobles. Its castle, probably raised by Simon de Senlis, the first Earl of Northampton, around 1084, became an occasional royal residence from Henry I onward. King John moved the Treasury there in 1205, some 32 Parliaments met inside its walls, and Thomas Becket was tried there in 1164. Richard I sold the townspeople their first charter in 1189 to help pay for his crusades, and by 1215 Northampton had a mayor, William Tilly, at a time when only London, York and King's Lynn had one.
Decline followed. The Black Death in 1349 killed more than half the inhabitants, and in 1460 the Yorkists beat the Lancastrians in the meadows by the River Nene and captured Henry VI. By 1484 the mayor was describing a town in desolation.
The Civil War brought a different kind of fame. Northampton sided firmly with Parliament, served as a garrison, and repelled Prince Rupert's attack at its North Gate in 1643. Its workshops turned out over 4,000 pairs of shoes for Parliament's soldiers, along with 600 pairs of riding boots for its horsemen, plus another 2,000 pairs for the New Model Army in 1648. Shoemaking kept booming for two centuries. After the monarchy returned, Charles II punished the town in 1662 by ordering its walls torn down and its castle partly demolished; the ring of main roads around the centre still traces where the walls stood.
A great fire in 1675 then gutted much of the old town, which was rebuilt and expanded with canals and railways into a centre of footwear and leather. Today its urban area holds about 249,000 people, yet bids for city status failed in 1992, 2000, 2002 and 2022.
Source: Northampton
