I have never been able to see Bury St. Edmunds in the favourable light of Carlyle’s description of the town. Listen to what he says of it: “The Burg, Bury, or ‘Berry’ as they call it, of St. Edmund is still a prosperous brisk Town; beautifully diversifying, with its clear brick houses, ancient clean streets, and 20,000 or 15,000 busy souls, the general grassy face of Suffolk; looking out right pleasantly from its hill-slope towards the rising sun: and on the eastern edge of it still runs, long, black, and massive, a range of monastic ruins.... Here stranger or townsman, sauntering at his leisure amid these vast grim venerable ruins, may persuade himself that an Abbey of St. Edmundsbury did once exist; nay, there is no doubt of it: see here the ancient massive Gateway, of architecture interesting to the eye of Dilettantism; and farther on, that other ancient Gateway, now about to tumble, unless Dilettantism, in these very months, can subscribe money to cramp it and prop it.”

That is the Carlylean picture of the place, and a very desirable habitation of picturesqueness and all the joys he paints it. But that is not quite the real Bury. How it managed so to impress him is a mystery, for the town itself is commonplace, and the great churches and the ruins of its still greater Abbey are quite distinct from it. Even those Gothic remains are sad and grim, and have not the usual inspiring quality of such vestiges of the past. In fact, nothing in the present condition of Bury in timber, brick, and stone can serve to envisage its ancient story. This is the tragedy of Bury, for that story is one of the most gorgeous of romances.

We first hear of the place, as “Beodric’s Weorth,” at the very remote period of A.D. 631. Of Beodric we known nothing, and the spot is mentioned thus early only because Sigebert, King of East Anglia at that time, founded a monastery here, a monastery in which he became a monk, and whose cloisters he only forsook to wage war with the heathen Penda. Fighting for the Cross he died, and thus early did the town secure the chance of honouring a martyr.

But not to the earliest or most deserving of those who have laid down their lives in the cause did the highest honours accrue, and we can scarce blink the fact that to St. Edmund, King and Martyr, who suffered a hundred and sixty years later, fell a great deal more than his just share.

Edmund, who was crowned King of East Anglia on Christmas Day, 856, reigned thirteen years before the great invasion of the Danes in 869 broke up his kingdom and brought him to a tragical end at Eglesdene, near Hoxne. Oakley Park is supposed to be the site of “Eglesdene.” Near by is a bridge over the Dove, known as “Gold Bridge,” the successor of the one under whose arch the fugitive King was hiding, according to the legend, when a newly-married couple, crossing the bridge by moonlight, caught the glint of his golden spurs in the water and revealed his lurking-place to the Danes.

If you consider it at all closely, the legend is not at this point very convincing, for, in the terrible wars of extermination then waged, when not only the actual combatants, but the entire people, went in fear, it is not very likely that honeymooning couples would be wandering about in the moonlight; but that is a detail. St. Edmund was, after all, very human, as well as very saintly, for he did what many an unregenerate would have done—he cursed that couple who revealed his presence. Nay, he did more; and perpetrated a wickedness of which no mere son of Belial or everyday child of ungodliness would have been guilty. He cursed every couple who in the future should cross that bridge to be married. ’Twas not well done, St. Edmund!

The legend goes on to tell how the Danes bound him to a tree and shot him to death with arrows until he was stuck full of them, like St. Sebastian. The very tree—an ancient oak—was for ages pointed out, and it is a marvellous fact that in 1849, when it fell, and was cut up, an arrow-head was found in the heart of that hoary trunk. This is not the place to tell of the many marvels that followed; but in the year 903, after the body had lain for thirty-three years in a wooden chapel at Hoxne, it was removed to Beodric’s Weorth, where it was placed in the Church of St. Mary, and became the bone of contention between the regular and the secular canons, until the time came, in 1010, when the Danes again overran the country, when they sank their differences, and conveyed the precious body of the Saint to London, for safety. It was escorted back in 1013, working many incredible miracles on the way, and replaced in the church, where it remained until Aylwin’s great monastic church, begun under Canute, in 1020, was completed.

Already the sainted King had become more powerful than any other miracle-monger, but his name had not yet been given to the town, which retained its old style until the time of Edward the Confessor, when it first became known as St. Edmund’s Bury.

As everywhere else, the Norman Conquest meant a great increase of ecclesiastical wealth and power at Bury. The Monastery was rebuilt, and its Abbot, mitred and all-powerful within the wide-spreading Limits of St. Edmund, was little less than a Bishop. The sanctity and potency of St. Edmund were not less than those of St. Thomas in after-years became. Pilgrims of every estate in the realm flocked to his shrine. Even kings entered into his courts with humility. Edward the Confessor walked the last mile bare-foot. Henry I., Henry II., and Richard I. were frequently here. King John, however, was in different sort. Jocelin of Brakelond, the old monkish chronicler, who was born in that very street of “Short Brakland” we may see in Bury to this day, tells us how, in 1203, that King stayed with the Abbot a whole fortnight, the said Abbot and Monastery being at that time only by way of recovering from much domestic mismanagement of former Abbots, and ill-prepared for the costs and charges of such entertaining. Carlyle, with picturesque efforts at recovering something of that visit beyond the mere dry and innutritious bones of dates, pictures that monarch “a blustering, dissipated human figure, with a kind of blackguard quality air, in cramoisy velvet, or other uncertain texture, uncertain cut, with much plumage and fringing; amid numerous other noisy figures of the like; riding abroad with hawks; talking noisy nonsense; tearing out the bowels of St. Edmundsbury Convent (its larders, namely, and cellars) in the most ruinous way.”

And when at last he went his ways, and the Abbot expected something kingly, he merely left a handsome silk cloak for St. Edmund, or rather, pretended to leave it, for one of his retinue borrowed it, “and we,” says Jocelin, or Carlyle for him, “never got sight of it again.” And all else the King gave was “one shilling and one penny, to say a mass for him; and so departed—like a shabby Lackland as he was! Thirteen pence sterling! this was what the Convent got from Lackland, for all the victuals he and his had made away with. We, of course, said our mass for him, having covenanted to do it—but let impartial posterity judge with what degree of fervour!”

The memory of King John’s hungry hordes and his shabby thirteen pence lingered at Bury, and it must have been with a peculiar satisfaction that the Abbot saw assembled at the high altar of his church the representative concourse of Barons who, on St. Edmund’s Day, 1214, swore to obtain from the King that Magna Charta which they did actually wring unwillingly from him in the following year.

Royal visits continued until the time of Henry VI., who held a Parliament here, but all the glories of the place are gone, and are only dimly perceived amid the mouldering ruins and damp churchyard walks that alone are left. The spot where the liberties of the English people were sworn to be upheld is accurst by the memory of how, three hundred years later, in the Marian persecution, twelve martyrs suffered at the stake for liberty of religious thought