The medieval town of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk was protected by a range of defences. The town was defended with a wall, bank and a ditch, with five gatehouses, while St Edmund’s Abbey had three gatehouses protecting its own perimeter. The first Great Gate of the abbey was destroyed during rioting in 1327 and was rebuilt a few years later. This still survives, near to another abbey tower, St James Gate.
History
11th-14th centuries
Bury St Edmunds was a Saxon town, originally called Bedericsworth. A monastery was probably founded there in the 7th century, and the town took its current name after the burial of St Edmund within the monastery in the 10th century. King Cnut refounded the monastery in the early 11th century as a Benedictine institution, and it became an important pilgrimage site.
St Edmund’s Abbey became one of the wealthiest monasteries in England. After the Norman Conquest, Abbot Sampson restructured the town around a grid pattern to the west of the abbey, and began to rebuild the abbey itself. Abbot Anselm continued this work between 1120 and 1148, extending the monastery walls to create a fortified precinct.
Anslem’s sacrist, Radilph Hervey, constructed defences around the replanned town, protected by four substantial gatehouses – West Gate, North Gate, Risby Gate and East Gate. South Gate, in the part of settlement across the River Linnet, was probably added later as the town expanded. The town wall probably stretched between West Gate and North Gate, with the remainder protected by a ditch and bank, and the curve of the rivers Linnet and the Lark. East Gate, also called Alesales, was controlled by the monastery. It was used by the cellarer of the monastery to collect tolls on incoming goods. Each of the gatehouses had a chapel above the entrance.
The medieval monastery itself had three gates. The southern gate has been lost, but the two western gates – the abbey Great Gate and the St James Gate – still survive. Both were intended to provide security for the monastery, and to impress the local town, but were not substantial military fortifications.
Abbey Great Gate guarded the main entrance to the abbey. The first gatehouse, probably dating from the 12th century, was attacked and destroyed during the town riots of 1327. Tensions had grown between the wealthy burgesses of the town and the abbey, which still controlled Bury St Edmunds and extracted considerable sums of money in taxes and fines. The abbey was badly in debt and the townfolk felt that the monks were lax in their adherence to monastic rules.
Violence finally broke out in 1327, amid a period of uncertainty in national politics. The rioters, organised by the town leaders, seized the gatehouse and then the abbey, which they controlled for several weeks. In destroying the gatehouse, they also destroyed and stole the abbey records and court documents. After a short period of chaos, royal forces eventually restored order. A law case ensued, under which the abbey were granted a huge £133,000 in damages against the town, which was promptly negotiated down to a more reasonable 2,000 marks (worth £1,333).1It is difficult to accurately compare early modern financial figures with modern equivalents. See our article on medieval money for more details.
Anslem then constructed a replacement gatehouse, which was completed by 1353. Two storeys high, it was built from Barnack limestone, with a central archway with buttresses and gabled niches, which would originally have held carved figures.
St James Gate, also known as the Norman Tower, was also constructed by Abbot Anselm, again from Barnack limestone. It had four external stages, all decorated in an ornate, Romanesque style, above an unvaulted gateway. The west side, overlooking the town, was the most decorative. The ground level has been raised over the centuries, so that the original base is now buried beneath the street.
15th-21st centuries
St Edmunds’ Abbey was closed in 1539 during the Dissolution of the Monasteries. The precinct was stripped of its stone, although the abbot’s house remained in use as a private dwelling until 1720.
St James Gate was used as a belltower for St Marys and St James’ churches for many years, and engravings at the start of the 19th century show it acting as a clock tower as well. The upper part of the archway originally held a statue of Christ, but this was removed in 1789 to make it easier to bring hay and straw into the town on wagons.
The St James gatehouse fell into disrepair, and after around £3,400 was raised by the town it was restored in 1846-47 by Lewis Nockalls Cottingham. Cottingham specialised in medieval architecture; he demolished the houses that had been built up against the tower, and removed much of the earth that had built up around the base, giving it its current appearance.
The medieval gatehouses fell into decline by the 18th century, with Northgate being robbed of stone to repair the roads. After a town order in 1761, they were pulled down to improve access into the town: Southgate was destroyed in 1762, Eastgate in 1763, Northgate in 1764, and Westgate and Risby followed in 1765.
Today, the Great Gate and St James gatehouses are adjacent to a public park. The park was originally part of the abbey grounds, and then became part of the garden of Abbey House in the early 18th century. The gardens were opened to the public for a fee in the late 18th century by the Marquis of Bristol, until they were leased to the town council in 1912. The town council purchased them in 1953 and combined them with the abbey churchyard, which it had bought in 1798, to create the current park. The remains of the abbey are in the care of English Heritage, and managed by West Suffolk Council.
Bibliography
- Bailey, Mark. (2010) Medieval Suffolk: An Economic and Social History, 1200-1500. Boydell Press: Woodbridge, UK.
- Tymms, Samuel. (1891) A Handbook of Bury St Edmunds. (6th edition) Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton and Kent: London, UK.
- Waugh, Scott L. (1991) England in the Reign of Edward III. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK.
- West, S.E. (1970) “The excavation of the Town Defences at Tayfen Road, Bury St. Edmunds, 1968,” Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History. Volume 32, Part 1. pp. 17-24.
- White, William. (1874) Directory of Suffolk. (3rd edition) Simpkin, Marshall and Co: London, UK.
Attribution
The text of this page is licensed under CC BY-ND 4.0.
Photographs on this page are drawn from the Flickr and British Museum websites, as of 5 December 2021, and attributed and licensed as follows: “Abbey Gatehouse“, author Martin Pettitt, released under CC BY 2.0; “The Norman Tower“, author Jim Limwood, released under CC BY 2.0; “Inside of gatehouse“, author Zeetha, released under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0; “Norman Tower c.1800“, image copyright The Trustees of the British Museum, released under CC BY-SA-NC 4.0.