This afternoon I delivered the Churches Conservation Trust‘s weekly lunchtime lecture on the theme of ‘England’s Other Westminster Abbey: Bury St Edmunds and its Royal Shrine’. The talk examined the role of St Edmunds Abbey as the centre of a royal cult, comparing it with Westminster Abbey and the Abbey of St Denis near Paris, and addressing the question of why Westminster Abbey survived as a great royal church while Bury suffered dissolution and ruin.
Francis Young 