Bury St Edmunds (), commonly referred to locally as Bury, is a cathedral town, market town and civil parish in the West Suffolk district, in the county of Suffolk, England.OS Explorer map 211: Bury St. Edmunds and Stowmarket Scale: . Publisher:Ordnance Survey – Southampton A2 edition. Publishing Date:2008. The town is best known for Bury St Edmunds Abbey and St Edmundsbury Cathedral. Bury is the seat of the Diocese of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich of the Church of England, 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 built up area had a population of 41,280 at the 2021 census.
Etymology The name Bury is etymologically connected with borough, which has cognates in other Germanic languages such as German 'fortress, castle', Old Norse 'wall, castle', and Gothic 'city'. They all derive from Proto-Germanic 'fortress'. This in turn derives from the Proto-Indo-European root 'fortified elevation', with cognates including Welsh 'stack' and Sanskrit - 'high, elevated building'. In Medieval Latin it was known as (also spelled Aedmundi).Memorials of St. Edmund's abbey: Annales Sancti Edmundi. Electio Hugonis abbatis. Epist. Roberti abbatis de Thorneye. La vie Seint Edmund, by Denis Piramus. Electio Symonis abbatis. Processus contra fratres minores, qualiter expulsi erant de villa Sancti Edmundi. Gesta sacristarum. Electio Thomæ abbatis. Deprædatio abbatiæ Sancti Edmundi. Appendix A, B. (1892:266). United Kingdom: H.M. Stationery Office.Monumenta Germaniae historica inde ab anno Christi quingentesimo usque ad annum millesimum et quingentesimum: Scriptorum. (1964:427). Germany: Impensis Bibliopolii Aulici Hahniani. In the Anglo-Saxon period the town was called Bedricesweord or Bedericesworth.
The second section of the name refers to Edmund, King of the East Angles, called Edmund the Martyr, 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 the diocese is "St Edmundsbury", and the town is colloquially known as Bury.
History
An archaeological study in the 2010s on the outskirts of Bury St Edmunds uncovered evidence of Bronze Age activity in the area. The dig also uncovered Roman coins from the first and second centuries. Samuel Lewis, writing in 1848, notes the earlier discovery of Roman antiquities, and as with several other writers connects Bury St Edmunds with Villa Faustini or Villa Faustina, although the location of this Roman site is also discussed by E. Gillingwater (1804), who notes the lack of evidence for it being here.
The town was one of the royal boroughs of the Saxons. Sigebert, king of the East Angles, founded Beodricesworth monastery here about 633, which in 924 became the burial place of King Edmund the Martyr, 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.
In 942 or 945, King Edmund I 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. Later, Edward the Confessor made the abbot lord of the franchise. The older monastery was destroyed and, the secular priests having been expelled, a new Benedictine abbey was built. 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.Richardson, Douglas, Magna Carta Ancestry, Baltimore, Md., 2005, p.297.
The town was for a time the home of a thriving Jewish community, and it is likely, although not certain, that Moyse's Hall belonged to a Jewish merchant. 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.Hillaby, Joe. "Jewish Colonisation in the Twelfth Century," in The Jews in Medieval Britain: Historical, Literary, and Archaeological Perspectives, ed. Patricia Skinner (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2003), p. 31.Roth, Cecil. A History of the Jews in England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978). 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."Jocelin of Brakelond, Chronicle of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, trans. Diana Greenway and Jane Sayers (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989) 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 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 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 riot destroyed the main gate, and a new, fortified gate was built in its stead. On 11 April 1608 a great fire broke out in Eastgate Street, which resulted in 160 dwellings and 400 outhouses being destroyed.
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.Thompson, Roger, Mobility & Migration, East Anglian Founders of New England, 1629–1640, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. 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 the Younger,Thompson, Roger, Mobility & Migration, East Anglian Founders of New England, 1629–1640, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994, 18. who became governor of Connecticut.
The town was the setting for witch trials between 1599 and 1694.Notestein, Wallace A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718, American Historical Association 1911 (reissued 1965) New York Russell & Russell,
Modern history The population had reached 12,538 by 1841.The National Cyclopaedia of Useful Knowledge, Vol.III, London, John Knight, 1847, p.960
A permanent military presence was established in the town with the completion of the Militia Barracks in 1857 and of Gibraltar Barracks in 1878.
During the First World War, bombs twice fell on the town in Zeppelin raids, on the first occasion dropped by LZ38 in 1915 and on the second raid by L16 in 1916, when seven civilians were killed.
During the Second World War, the USAAF used Rougham Airfield outside the town.
On 3 March 1974 a Turkish Airlines DC10 jet Flight 981 crashed near Paris killing all 346 people on board. Among the victims were 17 members of Bury St Edmunds Rugby Football Club, returning from France.
Notable features Near the abbey gardens stands Britain's first internally illuminated street sign, the Pillar of Salt, which was built in 1935. The sign is at the terminus of the A1101, Great Britain's lowest road which is mostly below sea level.
There is a network of tunnels which are evidence of chalk-workings, though there is no evidence of extensive tunnels under the town centre. Some buildings have inter-communicating cellars. Due to their unsafe nature the chalk-workings are not open to the public, although viewing has been granted to individuals. Some have caused subsidence within living memory, for instance at Jacqueline Close.
Among noteworthy buildings is St Mary's Church, Bury St Edmunds, where Mary Tudor, Queen of France and sister of Tudor king Henry VIII, was re-buried, six years after her death, having been moved from the abbey after her brother's Dissolution of the Monasteries. Queen Victoria had a stained glass window fitted into the church to commemorate Mary's interment. Moreton Hall, a Grade II* listed building by Robert Adam, houses the now-closed Moreton Hall Preparatory School.British Listed Buildings. Moreton Hall School, Bury St Edmund's (English Heritage Building ID: 466967) Bury St Edmunds Guildhall dates back to the late 12th century.
Bury St Edmunds has one of the full-time fire stations run by Suffolk Fire and Rescue Service. Originally located in the Traverse (now the Halifax bank), it moved to Fornham Road in 1953. The Fornham Road site (now Mermaid Close) closed in 1987 and the fire station moved to its current location on Parkway North.
Since March 2015, Bury St Edmunds has been the home town of the London and South East Regional Divorce Unit and the Maintenance Enforcement Business Centre (for issues with maintenance payments outside Greater London). The former processes divorce documents from across London and South East England as one of five centralised units covering England and Wales. Both units are based with Bury St Edmunds County Court in Triton House, St Andrews Street North.
Geography Bury is located in the middle of an undulating area of East Anglia known as the East Anglian Heights, with land to the east and west of the town rising to above , though parts of the town itself are as low as above sea level where the Rivers Lark and Linnet pass through it.
Climate There are two Met Office reporting stations in the vicinity of Bury St Edmunds, Brooms Barn (elevation ), west of the town centre, and Honington (elevation ), about north. According to Usman Majeed, head of Honington, the latter ceased weather observations in 2003, while Brooms Barn remains operational. Brooms Barn's record maximum temperature stands at , recorded in July 2022. The lowest recent temperature was during December 2010.
Rainfall is generally low, at just over , and spread fairly evenly throughout the year.
Religion
The town has a Christian heritage dating back to the foundation of the abbey in 1020. Today there are many active churches in the town.
Abbey