Bury St Edmunds - The Imposing Cathedral

UTRNTA  Report on visit to Bury St Edmunds Cathedral

After a very short coach journey we arrived a few hundred yards from St Edmunsbury Cathedral (as close as the coach could get in the narrow and restricted streets of Bury St Edmunds).  We divided into three roughly equal sized groups for our guided tour.

Our guide was a knowledgable and extremely personable lady who began by giving us a little of the history.  King Edmund was the Saxon king of East Anglia in the mid 10th Century whose resistance to Danish invaders, and specifically his refusal to renounce his Christian faith, led to his being executed by archers; then they cut his head off!  Legend has it that when his followers found his body, the head was being guarded by a wolf.  When they reunited the head with the torso the two were miraculously joined back together!  Thus King Edmund became Saint Edmund and his symbol is a crown crossed with two arrows, and he is often depicted with a wolf somewhere in the picture.

A Benedictine Abbey was founded and it became one of the most important centres of pilgrimage in England.

When the Abbey was dissolved by Henry VIII, the church took on greater significance.  Suffolk was divided between the diocese of Ely and Norwich but in 1914 a new diocese of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich was establish with St Edmundsbury becoming the cathedral church.

Our guide recounted much of this while moved around the building, showing us where the original 11th Century church was extended and remodelled in the 15th Century and then significantly restored by the Victorians under Sir Gilbert Scott, and finally extended again in the late 20th Century culminating in the magnificent new ‘millennium tower’ which was opened in 2005.

Most of the stained glass is Victorian, depicting prophets and stories from the Old Testament along the north aisle, with depictions of disciples and New Testament stories along the south aisle.  But there is one window, at the west end of the south aisle, that is medieval stained glass (I think she said it was the oldest example in England!)

In my opinion, our guide’s palpable enthusiasm for her subject made for a truly inspirational 75 minutes.

Then there was the utter delight of the streets of the lovely Bury St Edmunds and a bite of lunch before returning to our coach.