Bury St Edmunds: home to England's once (and future?) patron saint - staycation secrets #2
This is the second in my UK staycation series. If you want to get more inspo for future staycations, why not subscribe? Or forward to a friend who needs a covid-secure getaway?
We arrive late to the Angel Hotel in Bury St Edmunds. We walk from the station in the dark, past steamy-windowed restaurants serving early last orders. It’s nearly 9pm, and the hotel stopped serving food at 8:15; the 10pm curfew is now in force. But the Angel’s clientele are still going strong: when we enter, the bar is heaving: upholstered in blue velour, tropical birds on the wallpaper, bright and coppery tones shimmering.
The Angel Hotel, Bury St Edmunds.
The people of Bury are still enjoying their G&Ts, and show no signs of leaving. We head up to the room and order ours on room service. Outside on the square, the columnar road sign known locally as the Pillar of Salt, the only listed road sign in Britain, glows gently from within.
The Pillar of Salt, Britain’s only listed road sign, in Bury St Edmunds’ main square.
Location: Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
Accommodation & food: Angel Hotel, The Leaping Hare, No.5 Coffee shop, Queens Bar & Grill
Sights: St Edmund’s Abbey
Date of my visit: September 2020
The Angel is ivy-covered and set right in the centre of town, opposite the Abbey. The market square looks much as it must have done for many centuries, except that it’s now mostly covered with parking, flanked by the Athenaeum club perpendicular to the hotel.
Bury St Edmunds main square.
So the following morning we don’t have far through the Perpendicular gothic gate into what were once the gardens of St Edmund’s Abbey. The town and abbey are named after the once King of Anglia, martyred by the Danes in 869 for refusing to give up his Christian faith.
The former Abbey Gate, used by lay people.
Whilst still alive, he was shot full of arrows, a scene dramatically recreated (with some accuracy) in TV show The Last Kingdom. According to legend, Edmund was then beheaded and his head thrown into the forest, where it was later found by devout followers and united with its body after a ghostly wolf was heard crying ‘Hic! Hic! Hic’ (“Here! Here! Here” in Latin). This incident is commemorated in a fine statue of Edmund by Elizabeth Frink in the Abbey Courtyard, in which he is portrayed as a sliplike, almost ghostly figure, but nevertheless — holding the cross — defiant, stalked by a two dimensional wolf cut out of iron.
Elizabeth Frink’s statue of St Edmund, stalked by the wolf.
The abbey here predates even Edmund. Another devout king of the Angles, Sigebert, founded it in 663. It became the shrine of St Edmund when his body was buried here in the early 900s. The cult of Edmund, and thus the fortunes of the Abbey, were ascendant for many centuries: until 1350, he was considered to be England’s patron saint. He is even portrayed in the Wilton Diptych: he is the leftmost figure, holding an arrow, standing behind the kneeling Richard II. Various modern campaigns have attempted to reinstate Edmund to this position, with little success. However, we may also note that he is the patron saint of pandemics.
Ruins of St Edmund’s Abbey in the Abbey Gardens.
The monastery grew rich under royal patronage, and dominated the town. Much of the central part was built on a grid pattern by Abbott Baldwin in 1080, and ordinary citizens were taxed for the privilege of doing basically anything. The townspeople (perhaps unsurprisingly) sacked the monastery in the 14th century, even before the Dissolution, an incident over which the informational boards draw a discreet veil. More prominently commemorated is the massacre in 1190 of 57 Jewish inhabitants of Bury, which now merits a mention at the Holocaust memorial — a large steel teardrop — in the Abbey gardens.
Memorial to the Holocaust, and the massacre of Jewish citizens in Bury St Edmunds, Abbey Gardens.
Nearby is quite a different landmark: ‘the world’s first internet bench’, sadly no longer connected to a modem via the tube in the soil behind.
‘The world’s first internet bench’, Abbey Gardens
The remains of this once-impressive Abbey, basically a town in itself, now stand ruined. They rise, like weather-eroded sea-stacks, in the well-kept Abbey Gardens. The flint filling and stone dressings have crumbled so that in only a few places do fragments of the walls and arches of the vast Abbey church survive, like fossilised trees. On the ground, stubby walls and paving mark out where the life of the monastery took place: warming-rooms, ovens, kitchens and dormitories.
Abbey ruins with the present day St Edmundsbury Cathedral in the background.
On one of the lonely columns is a plaque, with a poem, commemorating the oath several Barons swore at the altar here, solemnised by the monks in 1214, that they would have the Magna Carta signed by the king. Thus Bury lays claim to the prehistory of another defining national event: the declaration would be signed the following year by King John at Runnymede.
Plaque commemorating the Barons' oath to get King John to sign the Magna Carta, solemnised by the monks at Bury St Edmunds.
From the ruins rises the present Cathedral of St Edmundsbury, one of the two parish churches within the Abbey complex that have survived. Originally built in 1135, it has been continually updated, most recently in 2000 when the tower was rebuilt, funded by private donations in a chessboard style that divides opinion. As such it is in excellent condition, although much of it is cordoned off due to Covid so we don’t get to see the mediaeval stained glass window depicting St Catherine.
St Edmundsbury Cathedral
Adjacent to this is the magnificent Norman gate, which survives virtually unchanged from when it was built in the 12th century. It was once the entrance for the monks of the abbey, and now holds the bells for the cathedral. In the abbey’s ruined walls nestle cottages and rather grander houses; windows peeking out of the crumbling flint like the eyes of cheeky goblins. One has a bay window with a view right through to the other side.
The Norman Gate, originally the monks’ entrance to the Abbey.
We potter around town in the rain, enjoying a light lunch and doorstopping cakes at No5 coffee shop, then retiring for a well earned siesta. For dinner we head out to Wyken Vineyards — winegrowing seems to have been popular in this region, even since the time of the monks. Well reviewed by Jay Rayner and a local stalwart, they serve up excellent seasonal food, much of it from their farm and local area. We start with a very generous glass of their own sparkling wine from the estate and thoroughly enjoy ourselves over three courses including rabbit, Wyken venison fillet and probably the best green beans I’ve tasted. The 10pm curfew means we start at 6, and are pretty tipsy by about 8:30. Things look a bit dicey when we ask the waitress to order us a taxi and she says ‘I don’t think they’ll be out here this late.’ But thankfully we make it home.
Houses tucked into the old Abbey walls
The following day is time for a head-clearing morning walk around the misty fields followed by a restorative pub lunch at Queens Bar & Grill. In Nowton we venture into the churchyard, meeting an old man with a feather in his hat who welcomes us in, asks us where we are from, surprised we are visiting even though we don’t have relatives here.
View across fields towards Nowton.
He asks us where we were born, then tells us with stories of how he grew up here, travelled the world and ended up back in the local area; how the mediaeval stained glass windows had been taken away for restoration, and how he regretted that, because of COVID, he couldn’t let us in. He drifted around the churchyard whilst we were there, looking at graves. As we leave, Aled remarks he could have been a ghost. I think it’s most likely his wife was buried there. On the way back into town, a muntjac deer skitters across our path.
St Peter’s Church, Nowton.
I hope you enjoyed this English getaway — I’d love to know what you think and feedback on anything else you’d like to see!
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Sincerely,
Ruth