A reconstruction of Bury St Edmunds Abbey
BURY ST EDMUNDS is a much-loved historic town, its parish church of St James elevated to the status of a cathedral in 1914. St James’s is a fine building, the body of it designed by the master mason John Wastell in about 1500, but extended with transepts and an eastern arm in 1959–70 by the architect Stephen Dykes Bower. Dykes Bower also left £2 million to fund the cathedral’s completion and, in 2000–05, the superb central tower, which now forms the town’s chief landmark, was finished. Impressive as this church is, behind it are the fragments of a building that once dwarfed it: the Benedictine abbey of St Edmund. If the abbey church had survived, it would be a building of European stature and one of our greatest medieval churches. It has a deep history.
In about AD869 Edmund, the Christian king of the East Angles, was captured and martyred by Danish invaders. Within a generation of his death, Edmund was revered as a saint. By 945, his remains had been moved from their original place of burial to Bury and a wooden church built. Pilgrims
