The Corpus of ROMANESQUE SCULPTURE in Britain & Ireland
"Bury St Edmunds"
Private house
Abbey Prospect is a Victorian canon's residence in the Great Churchyard, alongside the S wall of the abbey precinct. A long rear garden runs outside the precinct wall, and various carved stones were found in this and reset in the garage wall.
House
1 Langton Place is a brick building on the corner of Hatter Street and Langton Place, currently occupied by the So Bar.On the exterior wall of the Langton Place frontage is a chimney stack constructed of re-used limestone blocks and modern brick, whose angles are made of moulded limestone blocks. The limestone is presumed to be from the abbey. The stones are described below.
English Heritage Stone Store
The English Heritage collections store at Wrest Park contains material from sites in the east of England. For ease of accessing the material by site, we have decided to treat each source site within the store as a separate site, despite the fact that all the stones are housed in the same buildings at Wrest Park, hence this report only includes the stones from Bury St Edmunds Abbey.
Wrest Park is an English Heritage property; a 19thc house built to look like a French chateau, set in formal 17-18thc gardens given a touch of wildness by Capability Brown in the later 18thc. Wrest Park was bought by the Minstry of Works in 1946, who leased it to the National Institute of Agricultural Engineering (later the Silsoe Research Institute). It was taken over by English Heritage in 2006, and in 2013 a large warehouse to the E of the house, formerly used to store agricultural equipment, was converted into the EH Collections Store. It is one of several EH stores in England, and contains more than 160,000 objects from sites in the East and West Midlands, East of England and London.
The material is stored on rows of tall shelves; each row identified by a letter and each bay within the row by a number. The Bury material that has been shelved is in Row Z, bays 3 and 4 (Z-03, Z-04).
The architectural stonework from Bury St Edmunds held at the Wrest Park store is estimated to consist of approximately 1,000 pieces, and before it came to Wrest Park it was held by the Suffolk Museums Service at their West Stow site. The Bury stones at Wrest Park are generally marked with numbers with a 7810 prefix, which is taken to indicate that they came from the Ministry of Works excavations at the east end of the abbey church in 1957-64. Unfortunately this excavation was never properly reported; all we have is a short summary report by Roy Gilyard Beer published five years after the end of the dig. It is clear from the state of the material that it was never assessed or sorted, and the numbers written on the stones tell us nothing about where they were found during the excavation. Many of the stones have little or no real evidential value. Most bear some evidence of tooling or carved motifs, but many are mere fragments; too small for their purpose to be identified. A grimacing head sculpture on display at the Moyses Hall museum also bears the 7810 prefix number, and can be assigned to the Ministry of Works excavation.
When the Wrest Park stones were examined by the authors they had not all been shelved. There were 90 crates stacked on pallets containing mostly small stones, bagged by volunteers but not assessed, and approximately 50 plastic boxes containing larger stones. These were all in the main store. In the Orangery basement were larger crates holding big stones. Not all of the material was Romanesque, and indeed a high proportion could not be confidently assigned to any date. The stones chosen for reporting here had to fulfil the criteria of being both Romanesque and of an identifiable type. The authors are grateful to Dickon Whitewood of English Heritage for arranging access to the store, and for his invaluable assistance in the recording process.
Benedictine house, former
The Romanesque abbey church was begun by Abbot Baldwin in 1081, and it thus belongs with the massive building boom that followed the Norman Conquest. Its East Anglian contemporaries were Abbot Simeon's Ely Abbey (begun c.1082) and Bishop Herbert de Losingia's Norwich Cathedral (begun 1096). The abbey church had a 4-bay eastern arm with an apsidal east end surrounded by an ambulatory with 3 radiating chapels. Like the post-Conquest church of St Augustine's Canterbury, begun by Abbot Scotland (1070-87), Baldwin's church had a large crypt underlying its eastern arm, so that the sanctuary was raised above the level of the W part of the church. This plan was well-adapted for churches that held relics and attracted large numbers of pilgrims. It allowed the shrines holding the relics to be arranged around the transept and ambulatory and the chapels opening off them, so that pilgrims could venerate the relics without entering the choir.
The eastern arm was complete by 1095 and in that year the body of St Edmund was translated to the new church. Fernie has argued that the original plan was revised to effectively lengthen the eastern arm by one bay at the W, and that this accounts for the eastern aisle of the transept, and the fact that there appear to be doubled crossing piers at the E, corresponding to the end of the eastern arm and to the line of the transept E arcade a bay to the W. It has also been argued that this lengthening of the eastern arm was a response to the details of Herbert de Losingia's ambitious plan for his new cathedral at Norwich. As part of this enlargement, the entire church was widened, so that the nave is some 14 feet wider than the chancel.
Work proceeded westwards, and the lower part of the W front was reached in the abbacy of Anselm of St Saba (1121-48), an Italian and the nephew of the Archbishop of Canterbury of the same name. Anselm of St Saba joined the monastery of Sagra di San Michele (Piedmont) as a young oblate and subsequently became Abbot of Saint Saba in Rome, serving twice as a Papal Legate (1115 and 1117) before his election to the abbacy of Bury in 1121. His connections with Sagra di San Michele, where the celebrated sculptor Nicholaus was to carve the Porto dello Zodiaco, have been suggested as a source for features of the surviving Romanesque sculpture at Bury (Zarnecki (1999)). The W front was very wide but not especially tall. The central section, corresponding to the nave and aisles had three arched recesses, similar to Lincoln cathedral. In these were set bronze doors by Master Hugo, artist of the Bury Bible (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 21). Flanking the central block were two-storey chapels dedicated to Saint Denis (below) and St Faith (above) on the N side, and to St John the Baptist and St Catherine on the S. The facade terminated at either end with an octagonal tower. Abbbot Anselm also built the Norman Tower, whose elaborate carvings give some idea of the splendid original decoration of the W front of the abbey church.
The south side of the west tower fell in 1430, and in 1431 the east side followed. The north side was demolished in 1432. A papal bull granting indulgences for the repair of the `clocher' estimated the cost of repair at 60,000 ducats. Wills of 1457-8, 1460 and 1465 provided money for the fabric of the new tower. Repair work continued until 1465, when the church was seriously damaged by a fire which started in the west tower. More extensive repair work was undertaken, and in 1506 a western spire was completed. After the Dissolution in 1539 most of the church was soon reduced to ruins. What remained of the west front was the rubble core of the three main arches flanked by a smaller arched opening on either side and with an octagonal tower at the southern end. Domestic structures were built into the dilapidated west front in the 17thc., and records show that they were altered several times in the following centuries. In 1863 the S end had become a Registrar's Residence with a Probate Registry in the S tower.
The earliest excavation of the site was by Edward King in 1772-86, and in 1865 Gordon Hills published an account of the abbey written for the British Archaeological Association's visit in the previous year. This was described by Whittingham (1952) as 'the most authoritative account of the site' then available. A documentary study of the library and the fittings was produced by M. R. James (1895). Between 1928 and 1933 a programme of clearance and restoration of the ruins was undertaken by the Bury Corporation and the Ministry of Works, and in 1952 Arthur Whittingham produced his own assessment, including a plan of the site. An excavation of the eastern arm was carried out in 1957-64 by the Ministry of Works under the direction of A. D. Saunders and M. W. Thompson of the Inspectorate of Ancient Monuments, resulting in the clearance of the eastern end of the abbey church to its original floor levels, and consolidation of the masonry (see Gilyard Beer (1970)). A programme of conservation and stone replacement was undertaken in 1999-2000, and in 2004-06 the west front was converted into a row of houses with rear gardens. A Heritage Assessment was produced in 2018 by Richard Hoggett Heritage that usefully sums up the history of investigation on the site. As part of the present investigation, access has been gained to several of the West Front properties, and we are most grateful to the residents for welcoming us into their homes.
The ruins to the east of the west front contain very little ashlar, although a few well-preserved bases of the roll and hollow chamfer type may be seen and are illustrated here. Within the west front are a few carved stones, described below, and further abbey stones are preserved at Moyses Hall, in the English Heritage store at Wrest Park, and in the British Museum (see Comments below)
Gateway
The Norman Gate, or Norman Tower, was the W entrance to the precinct, facing the W front of the abbey church at a distance of some 75 yards. It was built in Barnack stone by Abbot Anselm (1121-48) and is an elaborate and imposing reminder of a great abbey that is mostly lost to us today. It stands four storeys high, and originally had a battlemented parapet, seen in the engraving made by Mackenzie, Thompson and Sands for Britton's Architectural Antiquities, but this was replaced by the present utilitarian parapet in Cottingham's restoration of 1842-46. Since the 18thc it has served as the bell-tower for the adjoining cathedral church of St James, and it houses a peal of 10 bells dated 1785.
The W face, towards the town, is the most elaborate, with a gabled entrance arch with four orders of shafts, and originally a tympanum that was removed in 1789 to allow carts to pass through. This is flanked by 3-storey buttresses in the form of turrets with pyramid roofs, decorated with blind arcading and grotesque corbels. The E face has a plainer entrance arch with no gable or pseudo turrets, and only 2 orders of shafts, but the upper levels on both of these main faces are similarly articulated with windows an blind arcading. The interior of the ground storey has no vault. The side faces of the tower are very plain on their ground storeys, where buttresses mark the original position of the precinct wall towards the W of each face, but their upper levels are similar to the two main faces.
House
In the rear garden of a private house in the centre of Bury St Edmunds is a grotto constructed of mixed stonework and railway slag ballast, which contains a few pieces of worked Barnack limestone, presumably from the abbey. The grotto takes the form of a shallow rectangular space with irregular stone walls to the N, S and E and a triple opening to the W carrried on roughly conical stone piers. The main entrance is through the central arch, and the flanking openings are overgrown with vegetation.
Public park
The Abbey Gardens occupy a large site bounded by Angel Hill to the W, Mustow Street to the N, the River Lark to the E and the cathedral and abbey ruins to the south. Officially the abbey ruins are part of the Abbey Gardens, but we have found it to convenient to treat them as separate sites. Access is normally through the Great Gate of the abbey on Angel Hill. The area of the Abbey Gardens is approximately 11 acres (4.5 hectares). It is divided into named areas, and carved stones have been found in the Remembrance Garden at the SW of the site, in the Pilgrim's Herb Garden next to it, and alongside the Marquis of Bristol's sundial and fountain in the formal garden just inside the Great Gate.
Museum, formerly merchant's house
Moyses Hall is a late-12thc secular building in the centre of Bury St Edmunds, facing the former Corn Market (now Cornhill) to the S and the Beast Market, or Hog Hill to the E. The main S front has 2 gables; the E with the flat buttresses typical of 12thc work. Construction is of flint rubble with Barnack ashlar dressings; the same expensive materials as were used in the contemporary abbey works, and it has thus been suggested (see Sandon 1977) that it was originally an abbey building. In 1804 the E wall collapsed and was rebuilt. It is now plain but formerly had flat buttresses and round-headed windows (shown in a print of 1748). In 1858 it was restored by G. G. Scott, who added the clock and bell turret to the E gable.
The original plan was a 2 compartment structure on 2 storeys, with a hall (E side) and solar (W side) above unusually tall vaulted undercrofts at ground level. The E undercroft, 2 bays wide and 3 deep, is groin vaulted with cylindrical piers as described below, while the W undercroft has a single row of 3 bays.
In addition to the fabric of Moyses Hall itself, this report includes the Romanesque stone sculpture held by the museum. Most of the objects described here are demonstrably from Bury St Edmunds Abbey, which has its own report. The abbey was in the possession of the Marquises of Bristol from 1806-1953, and the name of the 3rd Marquis, Frederick William John Hervey (1834-1907), is recorded as the donor of several pieces in the collection.
Public house
Behind the hotel is a dry-stone wall constructed of loose pieces of Barnack limestone, discovered in the garden of 35a Southgate St, adjacent to the hotel. The site is close to that of the former White Hart public house, in the grounds of which once stood St Botolph's Chapel (see History). The stones form a retaining wall for a raised garden.
Chapel, former
This lost site is included on account of the carved and moulded stones behind the Abbey Hotel, close to its former location. Yates (1843) published an engraving of the chapel, reproduced here, and as it had been demolished c.1801, this must have been old when Yates published it. What it shows is a simple structure with little in the way of elaborate doorways or windows.