Lichfield is a cathedral city and civil parish in Staffordshire, England. Lichfield is situated roughly 16 mi north of Birmingham, 8.1 miles southeast of Rugeley, 9 miles northeast of Walsall, 7.9 miles northwest of Tamworth, 13 miles southwest of Burton Upon Trent and 18 miles southeast of the county town of Stafford. At the time of the 2011 Census the population was estimated at 32,219 and the wider Lichfield District at 100,700.
Notable for its three-spired medieval cathedral, Lichfield was the birthplace of Samuel Johnson, the writer of the first authoritative Dictionary of the English Language. The city's recorded history began when Chad of Mercia arrived to establish his Bishopric in 669 AD and the settlement grew as the ecclesiastical centre of Mercia. In 2009, the Staffordshire Hoard, the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver metalwork, was found 5.9 km south-west of Lichfield.
The development of the city was consolidated in the 12th century under Roger de Clinton, who fortified the Cathedral Close and also laid out the town with the ladder-shaped street pattern that survives to this day.