Bosworth Hall (Market Bosworth)

Bosworth Hall is a historic country house and Grade II* listed building in the rural town of Market Bosworth in Leicestershire, England, now known as the Bosworth Hall Hotel. It was the country seat of the Dixie family (baronets of Bosworth) for nearly three hundred years. Since the 1980s the house has had several owners and is now a hotel.

Bosworth Hall is a former stately home which belonged to the once wealthy Dixie family, whose strong connections with Market Bosworth date back to the 12th century. At the time of the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660, the head of the family was created a baronet, of Bosworth, a title which became extinct with the death of Sir Wolstan Dixie, 13th and last Baronet, in 1975.

The parkland of the present house was bought by Sir Wolstan Dixie, Lord Mayor of London, in 1589, and the main house was built during the reign of William and Mary by his brother's descendant Sir Beaumont Dixie, 2nd Baronet, who had inherited the estate in 1682. The Dixie family fortune was lost in the 19th century, and the house and estate were sold in the 1880s to pay gambling debts.

In the eighteenth century Sir Wolstan Dixie, the 4th baronet, had a reputation for being a pugnacious bully, with a penchant for using his fists to settle any dispute, which often set him at odds with his neighbours and even ex-employees. As the chief trustee of the local school he "had complete control" over the appointment of tutors at the establishment. In March 1732 he appointed the young and impoverished Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) to a position of usher at the school, even though he did not have the required university degree.

Another stipulation of the school statutes that Dixie ignored was that the master be provided with a house of his own. Instead, Johnson was lodged at Bosworth Hall and, in the words of Johnson's biographer James Boswell (who had it from Johnson's lifelong friend, and near neighbour of Dixie, John Taylor of Ashbourne), Johnson became "a kind of domestick chaplain, so far at least, as to say grace at table, but was treated with what he represented as intolerable harshness; and, after suffering for a few months such complicated misery, he relinquished a situation for which all his life afterwards he recollected with the strongest aversion, and even a degree of horrour".

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