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Bury St Edmunds is a market town in Suffolk, England. Bury St Edmunds Abbey is near the town centre. Bury is the seat of the Diocese of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich, with the episcopal see at St Edmundsbury Cathedral.
The town, originally called Beodericsworth, was built on a grid pattern by Abbot Baldwin around 1080. It is known for brewing and malting (Greene King brewery) and for a British Sugar processing factory, where Silver Spoon sugar is produced. The town is the cultural and retail centre for West Suffolk and tourism is a major part of the economy.
The name Bury is etymologically connected with borough, which has cognates in other Germanic languages such as the German “burg” meaning “fortress, castle”; Old Norse “borg” meaning “wall, castle”; and Gothic “baurgs” meaning “city”. They all derive from Proto-Germanic *burgs meaning “fortress”. This in turn derives from the Proto-Indo-European root *bhrgh meaning “fortified elevation”, with cognates including Welsh bera (“stack”) and Sanskrit bhrant- (“high, elevated building”). There is thus no justification for the folk etymology stating that the Cathedral Town was so called because St Edmund was buried there.
The second section of the name refers to Edmund King of the East Angles, who was killed by the Vikings in the year 869. He became venerated as a saint and a martyr, and his shrine made Bury St Edmunds an important place of pilgrimage.
The formal name of both the borough and the diocese is “St Edmundsbury”. Local residents often refer to Bury St Edmunds simply as “Bury”.
Bury St Edmunds
Bury St Edmunds (Beodericsworth, Bedrichesworth, St Edmund’s Bury), supposed by some[who?] to have been the Villa Faustina of the Romans, was one of the royal towns of the Saxons.[citation needed] Sigebert, king of the East Angles, founded a monastery here about 633, which in 903 became the burial place of King Edmund, who was slain by the Danes in 869, and owed most of its early celebrity to the reputed miracles performed at the shrine of the martyr king. The town grew around Bury St Edmunds Abbey, a site of pilgrimage. By 925 the fame of St Edmund had spread far and wide, and the name of the town was changed to St Edmund’s Bury.
In 942 or 945 King Edmund had granted to the abbot and convent jurisdiction over the whole town, free from all secular services, and Canute in 1020 freed it from episcopal control. Edward the Confessor made the abbot lord of the franchise. Sweyn, in 1020, having destroyed the older monastery and ejected the secular priests, built a Benedictine abbey on St Edmund’s Bury. Count Alan Rufus is said to have been interred at Bury St Edmunds Abbey in 1093. In the 12th and 13th centuries the head of the de Hastings family, who held the Lordship of the Manor of Ashill in Norfolk, was hereditary Steward of this abbey.
On 18 March 1190, two days after the more well-known massacre of Jews at Clifford Tower in York, the people of Bury St Edmunds massacred 57 Jews. Later that year, Abbot Samson successfully petitioned King Richard I for permission to evict the town’s remaining Jewish inhabitants “on the grounds that everything in the town… belonged by right to St Edmund: therefore, either the Jews should be St Edmund’s men or they should be banished from the town.” This expulsion predates the Edict of Expulsion by 100 years. In 1198, a fire burned the shrine of St Edmund, leading to the inspection of his corpse by Abbot Samson and the translation of St Edmund’s body to a new location in the abbey.
The town is associated with Magna Carta. In 1214 the barons of England are believed to have met in the Abbey Church and sworn to force King John to accept the Charter of Liberties, the document which influenced the creation of the Magna Carta, a copy of which was displayed in the town’s cathedral during the 2014 celebrations. By various grants from the abbots, the town gradually attained the rank of a borough.
Henry III in 1235 granted to the abbot two annual fairs, one in December (which still survives) and the other the great St Matthew’s fair, which was abolished by the Fairs Act of 1871.In 1327, the Great Riot occurred, in which the local populace led an armed revolt against the Abbey. The burghers were angry at the overwhelming power, wealth and corruption of the monastery, which ran almost every aspect of local life with a view to enriching itself. The riot destroyed the main gate and a new, fortified gate was built in its stead. However, in 1381 during the Great Uprising, the Abbey was sacked and looted again. This time, the Prior was executed; his severed head was placed on a pike in the Great Market.[citation needed] On 11 April 1608 a great fire broke out in Eastgate Street, which resulted in 160 dwellings and 400 outhouses being destroyed.
Bury St Edmunds associated with Magna Carta
Thomas Warren’s map of Bury St Edmunds, 1776
The town developed into a flourishing cloth-making town, with a large woollen trade, by the 14th century. In 1405 Henry IV granted another fair.
Elizabeth I in 1562 confirmed the charters which former kings had granted to the abbots. The reversion of the fairs and two markets on Wednesday and Saturday were granted by James I in fee farm to the corporation. James I in 1606 granted a charter of incorporation with an annual fair in Easter week and a market. James granted further charters in 1608 and 1614, as did Charles II in 1668 and 1684.
Parliaments were held in the borough in 1272, 1296 and 1446, but the borough was not represented until 1608, when James I conferred on it the privilege of sending two members. The Redistribution of Seats Act 1885 reduced the representation to one.
The borough of Bury St Edmunds and the surrounding area, like much of East Anglia, being part of the Eastern Association, supported Puritan sentiment during the first half of the 17th century. By 1640, several families had departed for the Massachusetts Bay Colony as part of the wave of emigration that occurred during the Great Migration.[14] Bury’s ancient grammar school also educated such notables as the puritan theologian Richard Sibbes, master of St Catherine’s Hall in Cambridge, antiquary and politician Simonds D’Ewes, and John Winthrop, Jr, who became governor of Connecticut.
The town was the setting for witch trials between 1599 and 1694.
