The Abbey of Bury St Edmunds was one of the wealthiest and most highly privileged Benedictine abbeys in medieval England. It owed its prestige in no small measure to the fact that it contained the shrine of St Edmund, king and martyr, King of East Anglia, who had been killed by the Danes in 869. The abbey was one of the five monasteries in England under the direct authority of the pope and so exempt from metropolitan and diocesan control. In secular affairs it was equally privileged. In its Liberty of the eight and a half hundreds, comprising all west Suffolk, the abbey exercised shrieval jurisdiction and within the town of St Edmunds itself it had regalian rights: no minister or official of the crown could enter without the abbot's express agreement.

An exceptionally rich archive survives from St Edmunds. There are extant about forty registers and cartularies, some of massive size and containing copies of documents and literary pieces relating to all periods of the abbey's history. Besides these, about 270 volumes survive of the monks’ library books, though this number is only a small fraction of the original collection which comprised between 1,500 and 2,000 volumes. Despite, or perhaps because of, this abundance of primary sources for the abbey's history, no attempt at a comprehensive study has been made since the publication of Albert Goodwin's The Abbey of St. Edmundsbury (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1931). This good but short account, now out of print, was the author's Gladstone Memorial Prize Essay, awarded in 1926. For his study Goodwin used what primary sources were available in print at that time, that is, chronicles, public records and documents from the abbey's archives, besides secondary sources. But much relevant material has been published since. New, up-to-date, editions of the Latin texts, with English translations, of its three most important chronicles have appeared in Nelson's, later Oxford, Medieval Texts series: the Chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond, edited by H. E. Butler (1949); the Chronicle of the Election of Hugh, Abbot of Bury St Edmunds and later Bishop of Ely, edited by R. M. Thomson; and The Chronicle of Bury St Edmunds 1212– 1301, which I edited (1964).