The mediaeval streets were the main intersecting highway, consisting of the Hot Gate and the Apple Gate, Red Cross Street, and Soar Lane or St. Mary's Church Lane. The lane running South of the Newarke from the High Road to the Mill on the River was called Mill Lane in the middle of the 14th century.
The Hot Gate is mentioned in 1297, when John the Noble belied his name by committing a burglary there. It was known as "vicus calidus," or Hot Gate, because the public ovens were situated in that locality. A conveyance, dated 1362, of a house in the Hot Gate to a baker, is extant. The memory of the ovens which once warmed this part of the town is still kept alive by the name of Bakehouse Lane, or Fosbrooke Bakehouse Lane, a street which was comprised under the same name in the eleventh Ward of 1484. In the year 1586 the Hot Gate was described in a Lease as "Hot Gate, late the lane of the common oven." Nichols and North erroneously identified it with Silver Street, but its position is clearly determined by the Ward division of 1484, wherein the tenth Ward began "at the High Cross southward on both sides the street unto the Grey Friars' Lane and the Soar Lane, the Hot Gate and so forth to the West Bridge." It is now called St. Nicholas Street.
Applegate, the continuation of Hot Gate towards the West Bridge, still bears the same name. In the 14th century it was known as Apple Lane. In 1349 a house in "Apple Lane" was described as adjoining the bakehouse of the Earl and stretching from that lane to the Holy Bones. This identifies Apple Lane with Apple Gate. The same, or another house, described in 1471 as being in the Applegate and adjoining the King's bakehouse, also stretched to the Holy Bones. It would seem that the street was also known as Shambles Lane, and that the common shambles of the butchers lay there. There was another Butchers' Shambles in the Saturday Market, which in time superseded the Applegate. In a 16th century petition the Company of Leicester Butchers expressed a wish to confine their business to the Saturday Market shambles, as the shambles in St. Nicholas Parish were then "out of the way of trading and remote from the inns and shopkeepers." In 1594 both butchers and bakers were
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