When the Dissolution of the Monasteries began under Henry VIII in 1536, the Greyfriars establishments were among those dissolved relatively early in the process. The Leicester Greyfriars was dissolved in 1538. The dissolution process involved the dispersal of the community’s religious personnel, the removal of portable valuables, and the sale or gift of the physical property to secular buyers. The buildings might be converted to other uses, sold for their building materials, or allowed to fall into decay depending on local circumstance and the interests of whoever acquired the property.
In Leicester’s case, the Greyfriars site passed through several hands over the following centuries. Parts of the buildings were converted; others deteriorated. By the seventeenth century, the church itself had been demolished, and the site was built over by secular structures. A garden associated with the property around 1600 apparently contained a pillar said to mark Richard III’s grave location — Robert Herrick, a Leicester antiquary, mentioned this marker in 1612 — but the marker had disappeared by the nineteenth century.
By the time the Leicester City Council developed the site for office use in the twentieth century, and the car park was established, the Greyfriars had been invisible for three hundred years. The accumulated layers of later development — houses, gardens, drainage works, post-war office construction — had buried the medieval remains beneath multiple meters of debris. The car park surface itself dated to the 1940s. What lay beneath it was, in the early twenty-first century, genuinely unknown.
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## The Archaeology of the Site