Here in St Edmundsbury cathedral, a bunch of clerics and local bigwigs are preparing for a most unusual anniversary. Throughout 2020 the inhabitants of this historic market town will be celebrating the 1,000th birthday of a building that ceased to exist nearly 500 years ago.
The Benedictine Abbey of Bury St Edmunds was founded by King Canute in 1020 to house the body of King Edmund, England’s original patron saint. Traditionally said to have been born in 841 and crowned King of East Anglia in 855, Edmund was captured in 869 by the Danes, who told him he could be their puppet king if he renounced Christianity. He refused, so the Danes tied him to a tree, shot arrows at him and chopped his head off. When his head was reunited with his mutilated body (with the help of a talking wolf) he became a saint. Monks carted his uncorrupted corpse around for 150 years, until Canute built this abbey. A popular place of pilgrimage, it became one of the biggest and wealthiest monasteries in Christendom, and Bury St Edmunds became a boom town — all thanks to that talking wolf.
After Henry VIII dissolved the abbey in 1539, you might think the town would have dwindled into insignificance. But, remarkably, in subsequent centuries it went from strength to strength. Its medieval buildings were supplemented by several Georgian ones, including the lovely Theatre Royal, saved in the 1920s by the Greene King brewery across the road, which used it to store beer barrels before handing it over to the National Trust. (And if you fancy a beer, why not sink a pint or two at The Nutshell, opposite the old Corn Exchange? At 15 feet by seven, it’s reputedly Britain’s smallest pub.
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