History
Bury’s slogan ‘Shrine of a King, Cradle of the Law’ recalls two defining events in its history. The town’s namesake St Edmund was the last king of East Anglia, decapitated by the Danes in 855. The martyr’s body was reburied here in 903, and began to trot out ghostly miracles from the grave. His shrine became a centre of pilgrimage and the core of a new Benedictine monastery. At its height the abbey was one of the most famous and wealthy in the country, at least until Henry VIII got his grubby hands on it in 1536, during the dissolution of the monasteries.
‘Cradle of the Law’ refers to how in 1214 the English barons drew up a petition that would form the basis of the Magna Carta here in the abbey, thus setting the country on the road to a constitutional government.
