Bury St Edmunds (), commonly referred to locally as Bury, is a historic market and cathedral town and civil parish in Suffolk, England. 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.
Etymology
The name Bury is etymologically connected with borough, which has cognates in other Germanic languages such as German 'fortress, castle' and '(defined) area' 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'.
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 (Beodericsworth, Bedrichesworth, St Edmund's Bury) 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 a monastery here about 633, which in 903 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. 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 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.
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.