Bury St Edmunds 

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Historical notes about the Town of Bury St Edmunds

It has done a great thing; always important, it has grown in modern times to be the capital of the Western half of the county, with the feeling of medieval England still about it.  It is the cathedral town, and even the traveller who walks about it for a morning catches the spirit of its noble civic motto, Shrine of the King, Cradle of the Law.  It goes back to the days when pilgrims came from every part to the shrine of the martyred King Edmund, and it was here the barons met before Magna Carts.

A captivating town, it is worthy of so great a history, with its fine old streets and squares, the spacious ruins of its abbey, Norman and medieval towers of great splendour, ancient inns and noble churches, and a Norman house on Cornhill, known as Moyses Hall, in which are the oldest possessions of the town, for it is now a museum with relics of Roman and Saxon and prehistoric days, and fragments of sculpture from the vanished abbey.  It has the last sedan chair used in England (except for the chair still used in Hampton Court occasionally), and also has relics of the grim story of Maria Marten, which is covered in the village of Polstead.  Under a 15^th century window built into the front of the museum is a carving of a wolf and St Edmund’s head.  A walk of a minute or two brings us to another Norman archway set in the house, and looking across the street is the medieval porch of the new Guildhall.  The old Guildhall is gone, but the 15^th century porch remains, leading to a 13^th century doorway.

In Northgate Street is the gatehouse of a 12^th century hospital.  In Eastgate is a farm with the ruins of a monastic house.  There is an old house with finely carved corner-post, a barn on the site of St Peter’s Hospital where victims of the plague were buried, almshouses with fragments of an old cross in front of them, and the 18^th century Angel Inn with its 13^th century cellars.  The inn comes into Dickens, and Edward FitzGerald slept here the night before he died so suddenly after visiting his old school.  In St Mary’s Square is the fine old house of Thomas Clarkson, to whom so many slaves must have owed their freedom; there is a tablet with his name.  In Whiting Street is a chapel with an obelisk to two of Bury’s heroes, John Copping and Elias Thacker, who were hanged for distributing tracts.

The town hall is 17^th century, and near it is the Corn Exchange, with a big sculptured group of figures representing toil and harvest.  Near the Spread Eagle Inn is a memorial fountain to Marie Louise Ramee, a French teacher’s daughter who was born at Bury but lived half her life in Italy, making her name famous as a writer and dying in poverty at Lucca. She was known as Ouida and was a warm friend of animals; her 45 novels dealt largely with fashionable life, and she wrote for a reading public that is now passing away.

In the marketplace is a bronze of a wounded soldier by Mr A. G. Walker, in memory of 193 men who fell in the South African War.  The soldier is painfully raising himself from a rock, and has a fine face with a tense expression.

But the chief heritage of Bury St Edmunds from the historic past is in two gateways, magnificent survivals from Norman and medieval England, one leading into the ruins of one of the richest monasteries in East Anglia, the other housing the bells that summon the town to the cathedral church.  There cannot be many towns with two great monuments like these, and if Bury had nothing more to see these towers would bring a multitude of pilgrims through its streets.

The medieval gateway of the abbey, leading us from the square called Angel Hill into the gardens laid out where the old monks used to walk, stands about 60 feet high, richly decorated with heads and small carvings, canopied niches and traceried panels, and with slender clustered shafts running up; it is all 14^th century work.  One of the shields on the walls has the arms of Edward the Confessor, and there is a carving showing a bull worried by dogs.  The grooves for the portcullis are still visible.

Through this massive gateway we come into a few of the historic acres of England.  Here it was that they laid King Edmund, killed by an arrow under a tree at Hoxne because he would not forswear his faith.  Here the barons swore at Edmund’s altar that the king should do their will, sowing the seeds of Magna Carta.  Here was buried the conqueror’s daughter Constance, and here they found the stone coffin of Abbot Samson, the man who opened Edmund’s coffin and saw the saint as he was.

There has been much excavation, and we may see the walls of the crypt of the abbot’s palace 700 years old, with part of a turret called the Dove House.  Under the mounds are the walls of kitchens and dormitories, and there is an old buttressed wall by the river to protect the monks from floods.  Two arched built into houses are all that is left of the mighty church which stood in these grounds, the third church built for St Edmund’s body.  It was over 500 feet long, built about the year 1095, and it was in this place that the barons met; their 25 names are on tablets and on a pier is this inscription:

Near this spot, on the 20^th of November 1215, Cardinal Langton and the Barons swore at St Edmunds altar that they would obtain from King John the ratification of Magna Carta.

This great place was old when the massive gateway was raised, but close by it stands a gateway which saw the monastery in the days of its glory.  It has now become the bell tower of St James’s Church, Bury’s Cathedral, and has been called one of the purest specimens of Norman architecture in England.  Its walls are nearly six feet thick and 86 feet high, and its rich Norman work was done with axes.  It has three tiers of arcades, small doorways in buttresses, and a square hooded doorway which was the porter’s gate.  In the days of its greatness it was the gateway of the abbey churchyard; now it houses the ten bells of St James’s.  We can go to the top and see all Bury, or we can go through the gateway into the ruins and gravestones, walking among houses probably built of materials from the abbey.

There are two chief churches: St James’s called the Cathedral, and St Mary’s, both impressive and spacious places.

Church of St James a.k.a. St Edmundsbury Cathedral

St James’s comes from our three great building centuries, begun in the 13^th and finished in the 15^th, its chancel having been twice made new.  It has a rich west front with fine medieval moulding and panelling, and a sundial on a buttress which says to passers by, Go about your Business.  The nave is filled with slender piers which carry the arcades of nine bays to a great height, and the effect of a cathedral interior comes from its marvellous array of windows, 27 below and 36 filled with cathedral glass in the clerestory.

The great nave is nearly 140 feet long and half as wide, newly roofed last century by Sir Gilbert Scott when he rebuilt the chancel.  The roofs of the aisles are 15^th century.  The chancel has mosaics of the Evangelists and frescoes of musical angles, and richly carved stone seats designed from the ancient pattern.  Its chief possession is the handsome Bishop’s Throne, a superb piece of modern craftsmanship 25 feet high.  It is all in oak, with fine canopies and delicate pinnacles, and with a boss in the vaulting of the crown and arrows of St Edmund, whose head is guarded by wolves.  On the desk-ends are a griffin and an antelope.  This throne has a font cover matching it, both the work of Mr F. E. Howard, an Oxford master of his craft.  The font bowl stands on an ancient shaft; the bowl, like the cover, is new.  The cover rises over 20 feet high, its rich canopy work adorned with emblems, its vaulted canopy with a central boss of a holy dove.  Round the base are painted shields reminding us that this superb piece of woodwork is a memorial to those who did not come home from the Great War, many of them having been christened here.

The church is rich in possessions.  On the high altar is a memorial cross in memory of an only child, with an inscription that life is eternal, love immortal, and deaths only the horizon, the limit of our sight; and there is a beautiful processional cross with crystals and enamels.  The oldest treasure of the church is the chalice veil, a piece of Italian embroidery made about 1650.  It has floral designs and emblems of the Passion worked in gold and other colours, and a raised figure of Our Lord.  The gilded bronze candlesticks in the lady chapel are copies of those in the cathedral at Ghent, and the reredos in this chapel was carved by the lady it commemorates, Miss Lucy Giradot.  Close by it is a painting by an unknown German artist.

The chief sculpture in St James’s is a remarkable monument by the west door on which James Reynolds sits in his judge’s robes, with wig and chain as he would sit 200 years ago, as Chief Baron of the Court of Exchequer.  Cherubs are drawing back the curtains that we may see him, one holding a torch and one weeping, and a little cherub is set aloft blowing a trumpet.  Near the font are two marble portraits, a Chantry medallion of the Revd E. V. Blomfield, and a marble of Benjamin Malkin copied from a bust by Chantrey; he was headmaster of King Edward’s School and had Edward FitzGerald among his scholars.

As for the glory of these great windows, enriching this church with colour and light, they are all modern but one, mostly the work of Clayton and Bell.  The great west window shows the Last Judgment, and the east window the Transfiguration with scenes in the Life of St James.  The north aisle windows have Old Testament scenes, the south aisle New Testament, and by the west door is the best of all, the Story of the Creation.  The oldest window is in the aisle at the south-west corner, and is called the Susanna window because it has her story in the lower lights.  All the glass in this window has been collected and is old, some from the 14^th century.  It shows parts of a Jesse Tree, some kings and a bishop, Joachim carrying a lamb, two figures perhaps Cain and Abel, St Catherine, and kneeling angels with green wings.  It is the general effect of the windows that is their great merit; they give the church a splendour not to be forgotten.

Church of St Mary

The great church of St Mary has been continuous on this acre of mother earth for 1300 years.  The first church was built on the site about 633 and destroyed by the Danes; the second was built in 903 to receive the body of St Edmund, who was killed by the Danes; the third church replaced the wooden one with stone in 1032, but as the abbey church grew the site of ST Mary’s was required for a new wing of the great St Edmund’s Church, and the fourth church was built on the other side of the churchyard (the present site) in 1135.  It was pulled down in 1425, and the fifth St Mary’s has been used without a break since 1433.

It is 70 yards long with a splendid clerestoried nave of 10 bays under one of the most magnificent medieval roofs, angels and scores of saints looking down from the hammerbeams.  At the east end above the chancel screen is a richly painted beam and two fine angels looking down in red, white, blue, and gold.  The medieval chancel roof is richly carved and painted with angels holding scrolls, containing parts of the Te Deum.  At one corner of the south aisle is a little piece of the roof as it has been for 500 years; it covers the chantry of John Baret who lies below it, a wasted figure in a shroud on a strange altar tomb.

There are two staircases to the roodloft, the top and bottom doors on each side of the chancel arch carved with delicate tracery, and it is odd that the doors on one side are bigger than the others, a little fancy which means that the man who read the Gospel went one way and the man who read the Epistles went the other, and the bigger door is to indicate the Greater Glory of the Gospel.  We found much fine woodwork being done for the Suffolk Regiment, whose church this is; the roodscreen with its elegant canopy, in memory of all officers who die on active service, is fine, and the organ, one of the best in England, was being raised when we called.  The medieval choir-stalls have handsome poppyheads and heraldic animals on the arm-rests, among them a stag sitting on its haunches with a shield hanging from its jewelled collar, a sphinx, and a queer creature with a collar and a chain.  The font is also medieval, with lions and men round the base.

One of the most famous corners of St Mary’s Church is the Notyngham porch, built by a grocer of that name 500 years ago.  Very striking it is outside, with crowned lions and grotesque men, but it is its ceiling which attracts all travellers, especially the pendant hanging from the middle, which we must stand backwards at a difficult angle to see; it shows angels attending the Almighty.

The windows have about 800 figures in them.  The east window has the four archangels, the west is a thankoffering for an abundant harvest in 1934, one of the biggest windows in any parish church.  It has a lovely central figure of Our Lord with the Disciples, and scenes of Gethsemane and the Road to Calvary.  In another notable window, with about 70 figures in it, are scenes from a pathetic royal story.  The window was given by a queen of England in memory of a queen of France – it is Queen Victoria’s tribute to Henry the Eighth’s sister Mary, who lies in a grave by the altar here.

She was a beautiful girl of eighteen when it suited her only brother, Henry the Eighth, to marry her to King Louis the Twelfth of France, who had six months before lost his queen.  The princess crossed the Channel with 400 barons and knights, 200 gentlemen, and 80 ladies, and on reaching the French coast her ship ran aground, and the bride was carried ashore in a man’s arms.  It is a sad little tale, for she was married on October 9, crowned on November 5, and widowed on New Year’s Day.  Then she came back and married her old love Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, and her rapacious brother was so enraged that he made Brandon pay the cost of the French marriage and continual sums beside.

One of their daughters became the mother of Lady Jane Grey.  The king showed his sister much kindness in the end, and she took part in the dazzling pageantry of the Field of the Cloth of Gold; but she scorned Anne Boleyn, and came into disfavour again, and finally came to live at Westhorpe Hall in Suffolk, where she died in 1533.  She was buried in the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, and when the monastery was dissolved her coffin was brought to St Mary’s.  About 250 years after her death the coffin was opened and Horace Walpole took a lock of her hair.  We remember that 250 years after one queen’s death Pepys stooped down by her open coffin in Westminster Abbey and kissed her; she was Henry the Fifth’s Katherine.

It occurred to Queen Victoria to put up this window to the Queen of France and the marble stone round the tomb was given by Edward the Seventh.  The window has scenes of the marriage in France, her widowhood, her meeting with her brother, and her burial in the abbey; we see her also carried in a sedan chair.  On the stone above her grave are five crosses.

By the altar also lies Sir William Carew and his wife, who knew this church in the 15^th century, and on an altar tomb facing them lies Sir Robert Drury, Speaker in the time of Henry the Seventh.  His wife is with him and has a bag and a girdle.  Hanging in the lady chapel are two helmets of Sir Robert.

Among a small but very interesting group of brasses is one to George Estye of Shakespeare’s day; it has a candlestick in one corner.  Another brass has been twice used, once for Eleanor Wynn in 1400 and once for William Fairclyffe in 1600.  The brass portraits of Jankyn Smyth and his wife show them kneeling with raised hands, she in a butterfly headdress, and it is said that a sermon they endowed to be preached every Thursday after Plough Monday has been preached since 1481, the oldest endowed sermon in England.  There is a lovely brass of Archdeacon Fyners of 1509, and an engraved brass tablet to Peter Gedge, who printed the first newspaper in this town in the days of Napoleon.  We read of him that;

    Like a worn-out type he is returned to the founder, in hope of being recast in a better and more perfect mould.

Somewhere about St Mary’s lies George Kirbye, one of the best English writers of madrigals in the days of Merrie England.  He published 24 of them, calling them the first fruits of his poor knowledge in music.  There are three tributes here to men of the Suffolk Regiment.  One is to the fifty men who went down with the Birkenhead, standing at attention; another is to 153 men who fell in South Africa; and the third is the roll of honour for the Great War, which has over seven thousand names.

A Very Cruel Man

There was born at Bury St Edmunds one of the most sinister figures in our history and one of the cruellest men who have ever risen to power.  He was Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester and Lord High Chancellor.  He was the son of a clothworker, and had the chance of going to Cambridge, where he studied at Trinity Hall, at which he was to be for 24 years master of civil and church law.

He rose rapidly to positions of power, becoming secretary to Cardinal Wolsey.  Three times the king sent him to Rome to present his case for the divorce of Catherine.  When the break with the Vatican came, he trimmed and hesitated, but at last produced a justification in a treatise on the Royal Supremacy which was hailed in Europe as the Magna Carta of Protestantism.  Yet he was never really a Protestant, and, rising to almost unbridled power after the fall of Wolsey and then Thomas Cromwell, he framed the terrible Six Articles which made it possible to burn a woman alive for denying the humanity of Christ, a man for denying the divinity, and anyone for eating meat on a Friday.

Twice he struck at Cranmer, who escaped only by the intervention of the king, as we see in Shakespeare; yet Henry did not wholly trust him, and omitted him from his will after meaning to make him executor.  On the death of the king Gardiner refused to conform to the new religion under Edward the Sixth, and spent nearly the whole of that reign a prisoner, as willing as his victims to die for his faith.  When Mary Tudor visited the Tower on her accession he was one of the captives who knelt to her, and Mary released him and made him Lord High Chancellor.  He had buried Henry the Eighth, and now he was to crown and give unswerving allegiance to his daughter Mary.  He welcomed the revival of the Roman Catholic religion, he let loose the full tide of persecution, and was probably responsible for most of the 300 martyrdoms of her terrible reign.

Latimer and Ridley perished in the flames at his bidding, and Cranmer was already marked for the stake when Gardiner himself died suddenly in 1555.  It may be said that the bitter cruelty of this man was one of the chief factors in assuring the triumph of Protestantism by stirring the conscience and imagination of the people

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Historic images from around the Town of Bury St Edmunds

This small selection of historic images of Bury St Edmunds are from our British National Image Library. You may click on the thumbnail pictures to view larger versions and read what information we have regarding the image.

The Abbey Gatehouse

The Church of St Mary

The Cathedral Nave

St Mary's Nave

Norman Gate Tower

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 Angel Hotel 

 

 Pykkerell Inn 

 

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 Abbey Hotel 

 

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 Premier Inn Bury St Edmunds Town Centre 

 

 Priory Hotel (Best Western) 

 

 Ramada Bury St Edmunds