The Newmarket, Bury, Thetford and Cromer Road: Sport and history on an East Anglian turnpikeHarper, Charles G. (Charles George)
History
The Newmarket, Bury, Thetford and Cromer Road: Sport and history on an East Anglian turnpike
Harper, Charles G. (Charles George)
England -- Description and travel; England -- Social life and customs
The legend goes on to tell how the Danes bound him to a tree and shot
him to death with arrows until he was stuck full of them, like St.
Sebastian. The very tree—an ancient oak—was for ages pointed out, and it
is a marvellous fact that in 1849, when it fell, and was cut up, an
arrow-head was found in the heart of that hoary trunk. This is not the
place to tell of the many marvels that followed; but in the year 903,
after the body had lain for thirty-three years in a wooden chapel at
Hoxne, it was removed to Beodric’s Weorth, where it was placed in the
Church of St. Mary, and became the bone of contention between the
regular and the secular canons, until the time came, in 1010, when the
Danes again overran the country, when they sank their differences, and
conveyed the precious body of the Saint to London, for safety. It was
escorted back in 1013, working many incredible miracles on the way, and
replaced in the church, where it remained until Aylwin’s great monastic
church, begun under Canute, in 1020, was completed.
Already the sainted King had become more powerful than any other
miracle-monger, but his name had not yet been given to the town, which
retained its old style until the time of Edward the Confessor, when it
first became known as St. Edmund’s Bury.
As everywhere else, the Norman Conquest meant a great increase of
ecclesiastical wealth and power at Bury. The Monastery was rebuilt, and
its Abbot, mitred and all-powerful within the wide-spreading Limits of
St. Edmund, was little less than a Bishop. The sanctity and potency of
St. Edmund were not less than those of St. Thomas in after-years became.
Pilgrims of every estate in the realm flocked to his shrine. Even kings
entered into his courts with humility. Edward the Confessor walked the
last mile bare-foot. Henry I., Henry II., and Richard I. were frequently
here. King John, however, was in different sort. Jocelin of Brakelond,
the old monkish chronicler, who was born in that very street of “Short
Brakland” we may see in Bury to this day, tells us how, in 1203, that
King stayed with the Abbot a whole fortnight, the said Abbot and
Monastery being at that time only by way of recovering from much
domestic mismanagement of former Abbots, and ill-prepared for the costs
and charges of such entertaining. Carlyle, with picturesque efforts at
recovering something of that visit beyond the mere dry and innutritious
bones of dates, pictures that monarch “a blustering, dissipated human
figure, with a kind of blackguard quality air, in cramoisy velvet, or
other uncertain texture, uncertain cut, with much plumage and fringing;
amid numerous other noisy figures of the like; riding abroad with hawks;
talking noisy nonsense; tearing out the bowels of St. Edmundsbury
Convent (its larders, namely, and cellars) in the most ruinous way.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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