Bury St Edmunds

Bury St Edmunds (originally –until 1038) St Edmunds Bury, referring to the death of king Edmund of East Anglia who was murdered after a battle against the Danes in 869 and later canonised – “Bury” (as in burgh or berg) is a market town in Suffolk, north-west of Ipswich. In 2014 its population was 41,899.^[1] It grew up around the shrine to the saint, and a Benedictine abbey in the early 11th century, before becoming the first planned Norman town in England. There, in 1214, Stephen Langton and the barons of England swore an oath that would bring king John to Runnymede the next year to put his seal on the Magna Carta. The town was one of the few places to suffer any ruction during the Peasants' Revolt of 1381.

It was a place of pilgrimage during the Middle Ages, a grammar school was founded by Henry VI in 1550 and it claims to have the smallest pub in England – the “Nutshell”. The ruins of the abbey - destroyed during the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539, and the oft rebuilt and renovated St. Edmundsbury Cathedral, (its tower was completed as late as 2005) are a favourite tourist destination.

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