Place:Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, England

NameBury St. Edmunds
Alt namesBury St Edmundssource: variation in spelling
Burysource: common shortened form
Beodricesworthsource: Encyclopædia Britannica (1988) II, 671
Bury Saint Edmundssource: Getty Vocabulary Program
Bury St. Edmundssource: USBGN: Foreign Gazetteers
Bury-St. Edmundssource: Family History Library Catalog
Bury St. Edmunds St. Jamessource: cathedral church, see below
Bury St. Edmunds-St. Jamessource: variation in spelling
Bury St. Edmunds St. Marysource: parish within Bury, see below
Bury St. Edmunds St.Marysource: variation in spelling
Bury St. Edmunds-St.Marysource: variation in spelling
TypeBorough (municipal)
Coordinates52.25°N 0.717°E
Located inSuffolk, England     (500 - )
Also located inWest Suffolk, England     (1888 - 1974)
See alsoThingoe Hundred, Suffolk, Englandhundred in which it was located
St. Edmundsbury District, Suffolk, Englanddistict municipality covering the area from 1974-2019
West Suffolk District, Suffolk, Englandenlarged district municipality formed in 2019
Contained Places
Cemetery
Bury St. Edmunds Abbey


the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia

Bury St. Edmunds, commonly referred to locally as Bury, is a historic market and cathedral town and civil parish in Suffolk, England. The town is best known for Bury St. Edmunds Abbey and St. Edmundsbury Cathedral. Bury is the seat of the "Diocese of St. Edmundsbury and Ipswich of the Church of England", with the episcopal see at "St. Edmundsbury Cathedral".

The town, originally called "Beodericsworth", was built on a grid pattern by Abbot Baldwin around 1080. It is known for brewing and malting (the Greene King brewery) and for a British Sugar processing factory, where Silver Spoon sugar is produced. The town is the cultural and retail centre for West Suffolk and tourism is a major part of the economy. The population of Bury had reached 12,538 by 1841. It is now (2021) about 45,000.

Early History

The town was one of the royal boroughs of the Saxons. Sigebert, king of the East Angles, founded a monastery here about 633, which in 903 became the burial place of King Edmund the Martyr, who was slain by the Danes in 869. The abbey owed most of its early celebrity to the reputed miracles performed at the shrine of the martyr king. The town grew around Bury St. Edmunds Abbey, a site of pilgrimage. By 925 the fame of St. Edmund had spread far and wide, and the name of the town was changed to "St Edmund's Bury".

In 942 or 945, King Edmund I (921-946) had granted to the abbot and convent jurisdiction over the whole town, free from all secular services, and Canute in 1020 freed it from episcopal control. Later, Edward the Confessor (ruled 1042-1066) made the abbot lord of the franchise. The older monastery was destroyed and, the secular priests were expelled, and a new Benedictine abbey was built. Count Alan Rufus nephew and companion of William the Conqueror, is said to have been interred at Bury St Edmunds Abbey in 1093. In the 12th and 13th centuries the head of the de Hastings family, who held the Lordship of the Manor of Ashill in Norfolk, was hereditary Steward of this abbey.

For more information, see the EN Wikipedia article Bury St. Edmunds.

Image:West Suffolk 1894-1974 B.png

Bury St. Edmunds St. James

St Edmundsbury Cathedral (formally entitled the Cathedral Church of St James and St Edmund) is the cathedral for the Church of England's Diocese of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich. It is the seat of the Bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich. Originating in the 11th century, it was rebuilt in the 12th and 16th centuries as a parish church and became a cathedral in 1914; it has been considerably enlarged in recent decades.

Bury St. Edmunds St. Mary

St Mary's Church is the civic church of Bury St Edmunds and is one of the largest parish churches in England. It claims to have the second longest nave (after Christchurch Priory), and the largest west window of any parish church in the country. It was part of the abbey complex and originally was one of three large churches in the town (the others being St James, now St Edmundsbury Cathedral, and St Margaret's, now gone).

Puritans and Pilgrims

The borough of Bury St Edmunds and the surrounding area, like much of East Anglia, being part of the Eastern Association, supported Puritan sentiment during the first half of the 17th century. By 1640, several families had departed for the Massachusetts Bay Colony as part of the wave of emigration that occurred during the Great Migration. Bury's ancient grammar school also educated such notables as the puritan theologian Richard Sibbes, master of St Catherine's Hall in Cambridge, the antiquary and politician Simonds d'Ewes, and John Winthrop the Younger, who became governor of Connecticut.

Modern history

A permanent military presence was established in the town with the completion of the Militia Barracks in 1857 and of Gibraltar Barracks in 1878. During the Second World War, the USAAF used Rougham Airfield outside the town.

Research Tips

  • A map of Suffolk from 1900 provided online by A Vision of Britain Through Time (University of Portsmouth Department of Geography) can be enlarged to view individual parishes. Careful inspection will usually lead to the discovery of smaller hamlets founded before 1900. The rural districts (marked with their names printed in blue) are those in existence in 1900, not those introduced in 1934. The more ancient hundreds are marked in red. Most (but not all) parish names are underlined in red.

Suffolk Information

  • Suffolk Family History Society A community of people who are interested in the local and family history pertaining to Suffolk.
  • Suffolk Archives (Record Office) ( e-mail archives@suffolk.gov.uk) - The Suffolk Archive has branches in Ipswich (at The Hold, 131 Fore Street, Ipswich, IP4 1LR), Bury St. Edmunds (at 77 Raingate Street, Bury St Edmunds, IP33 2AR) and Lowestoft (at Lowestoft Library, Clapham Road South, Lowestoft, NR32 1DR). Includes: a good-looking website, research services and publications.
  • Suffolk Churches This is an excellent guide to most of the Suffolk Churches with lots of pictures and descriptions of the architecture and history. It includes many chapels. If you have trouble visiting Suffolk to see where your ancestor were baptised, married and buried, or even those who want to just add to their knowledge, this is the site for you.

For those whose families may have wandered over the county borders:

British Government Information

  • The National Archives or "TNA" - More than 850,000 Probate Wills from 1610-1858 (PCC wills dating back to 1670 have been completed). Free access to indexes but copy of a will costs £10.00. (Ancestry has an index to wills published after 1858.) Access also available to the Domesday Book, World War One Diaries and various other information. Their catalogue called Discovery holds more than 32 million descriptions of records held by The National Archives and more than 2,500 archives across the country including County Record Offices. Over 9 million records are available for download.
  • The British Library - This vast collection contains millions of bibliographic records, British newspapers, many now digitised and searchable on-line and much more.
  • Commonwealth War Graves Commission - The database lists the 1.7 million men and women of the Commonwealth forces who died during the two world wars and the 23,000 cemeteries, memorials and other locations world-wide where they are commemorated. The register can also be searched for details of the 67,000 Commonwealth civilians who died as a result of enemy action in the Second World War.
  • General Register Office - provides official copies of birth marriage & death certificates for England & Wales.
  • FreeBMD - provides Civil Registration index information for England and Wales. The transcribing of the records, by volunteers, is ongoing and contains well over 279 million records at August 2020. Records are complete from 1837 to 1983. Later records are not complete.
  • FreeCEN - provides a "free-to-view" online searchable database of the UK census returns from 1841 to 1891. The transcribing of the records, by volunteers, is ongoing and contains well over 39 million records at August 2020. At that time Suffolk records appeared to be only for the 1891 census and a few for the 1871 census.
  • FreeREG - provides baptism, marriage, and burial records, which have been transcribed, by volunteers, from parish and non-conformist church registers in the UK. There are over 49 million entries with just under 300,000 records for Suffolk at August 2020.
  • Ministry of Defence (url not found)- provides information for obtaining details about service records post 1920
  • Royal Air Force Museum (url not found) - for information on the archive and library research material available.
This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original content was at Bury St. Edmunds. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with WeRelate, the content of Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.