The confrontation between Franciscan friars and the monks of St Edmunds Abbey that began in 1233 lasted for thirty years, and was one of the most dramatic episodes in the history of religious life in thirteenth-century England. The confrontation is all the more interesting because there was no clear winner: in 1263, the friars finally agreed to leave the town of Bury St Edmunds, but the monks were forced to grant them land in a key location to build a friary, and to accept the existence of an important Franciscan house at Babwell, on the doorstep of their jurisdiction. It was an uneasy compromise that did not put an end to further conflict, and the presence of the friars at Babwell continued to serve as a foil to the monks’ ambitions into the late Middle Ages. The friars sheltered fugitives from the abbot, backed the townsfolk against the monks and challenged the monks’ religious authority over the town. Yet there is also evidence of more positive co-operation and co-existence between the two orders. As the only other religious house with whom the monks of St Edmunds Abbey had to co-exist, the friary at Babwell and its predecessors must be understood in order to make sense of one of England's greatest abbeys – but the Franciscan adventure in Bury St Edmunds is also a fascinating story in its own right, illustrative of the potent appeal and radical disruptiveness of the Franciscan order.

Since the publication of the first volume in 1979, the Suffolk Records Society's Charters Series has been a crucial resource for the study of Suffolk's medieval religious houses. The series has so far included volumes on Leiston Abbey and Butley Priory, Blythburgh Priory, Stoke-by-Clare Priory, Sibton Abbey, Clare Priory, Eye Priory, St Bartholomew's Priory in Sudbury, Dodnash Priory and the Priory of St Peter and St Paul, Ipswich. Future volumes are projected on Rumburgh Priory and Great Bricett Priory. None of the county's Franciscan friaries has hitherto received the same attention, however. The nature of mendicant houses, whose personnel was shifting and which did not, for the most part, subsist on grants of land, gives them a more ephemeral presence in the historical record.