In 1573 William Morton granted to the town a piece of land in the High Street extending northwards from Dead Lane 61 feet. The Elizabethan Grammar School was built partly upon this site. Hence it would seem that Dead Lane was merged in Freeschool Lane. This street must be distinguished from Deadman's Lane, a later name occurring in the West quarter of the town. Both Nichols and Thompson confused them. A way ran north out of Dead Lane to St. Peter's Church, which was known as Cross Lane.
Soapers' Lane, which was in the Parish of St. Peter's, was North of the Swinesmarket, and parallel to it. It was known as "the lane of the Soapers" as early as 1314, and doubtless the Soapmakers were settled in this quarter long before that date. Two sons of a member of this trade entered the Guild Merchant about 1200. The lane does not seem to have been thickly populated, as the Corpus Christi Guild for some hundred years owned a garden there, and another large garden lying in "Soaper Lane in St. Peter's Parish," was divided up between the members of a family in 1481.
Parchment Lane was the old name of New Bond Street, running North out of the old Swinesmarket. The Parchmentmakers were settled in Leicester as members of the Guild Merchant at the beginning of the 13th century, and the "vicus parcamenorum," or "Parchmentmakers' way," is described in a deed of 1303. Lord de Grey owned four houses and six other tenements, gardens or crofts there, and the Corpus Christi Guild in the 15th and 16th centuries possessed a barn there, which had once belonged to the Grange of the Abbot of Crowland. Four gardens in St. Peter's Parish were described in 1478 as "stretching to the lane called Parchment Lane to the West as far as the wall of the town," i.e., they lay between Parchment Lane and the East Wall by Churchgate. At the division of the Wards made in 1484, the sixth Ward ran "from the East Gate on both sides the street to Pexsall corner" (i.e., Pexsall's house) "with Parchment Lane." In 1524 it was resolved at a common hall" that the Swinesmarket shall be kept from this day forth in the
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