The repair of derelict buildings and the construction of new ones under Samson have been mentioned above, but his fame as a builder rests primarily on the many building works within the abbey precincts, both ecclesiastical and domestic, which his enthusiasm initiated and his energy pursued. However, of all his projects the completion of the abbey church was paramount in his mind and his overriding ambition was to have the church consecrated. Jocelin ends a passage summarising Samson's merits with these words:

Samson will have read in the De Miraculis Sancti Eadmundi (composed c. 1100) of Abbot Baldwin's failure to obtain permission from William Rufus for the consecration of the new (but unfinished) Romanesque church. He will also have known from his study of canon law that mass should not be celebrated in an unconsecrated place except in cases of ‘great necessity’, and that if there were any doubt as to whether a church had been consecrated or not, it should be consecrated even at the risk of it being consecrated twice. Doubt arose in the absence of reliable written record or of personal witnesses. There was certainly no written record that the abbey church had been consecrated after Baldwin's time. In Henry II's reign, probably in the late 1170s, a tract was composed recording the consecration of the numerous altars and chapels at St Edmunds and of the two parish churches (St James's and St Mary's) within the banleuca. The object of the tract was to demonstrate that the diocesan, the bishop of Norwich, had never consecrated at St Edmunds and, therefore, had no prescriptive right to do so. The tract was twice continued, first sometime after Samson had built the new infirmary, and then late in Simon of Luton's abbatiate (1257–79). It is clear from it that the abbey church itself had never been consecrated.