At some point during the 1070s the archbishop of Canterbury, Lanfranc, wrote to Herfast (bishop of East Anglia 1070–84/5) in trenchant terms. Much of his letter criticized the bishop's lifestyle – ‘Give up the dicing (to mention nothing worse) and the world's amusements in which you are said to idle away the entire day’ – and the company he kept: ‘Banish the monk Hermann, whose life is notorious for its many faults, from your society and your household completely.’ Instead, Lanfranc told his bishop to read Scripture and above all to master the decrees of the Roman pontiffs and the canons of the holy councils, to ‘discover what you do not know’ and ‘ensure that you hold no opinion that is at variance with your mother church’. The significance of that advice finds context in the opening of the letter, which relates to the affairs of the abbey of Bury St Edmunds. After a conventional greeting, where Lanfranc wished Bishop Herfast might be humble in wisdom and of sober understanding, the archbishop began by observing that Berard, a cleric of Abbot Baldwin of Bury, had delivered a previous letter from the Archbishop to Bishop Herfast. He went on:

This explanation of the causes and effects working within the human body is found in an eleventh-century medical text from Salerno, the Passionarius (‘Book of Diseases’) attributed to the physician Gariopontus. This medical text survives in sixty-five medieval manuscripts, one of which is now London, British Library, MS Royal 12. C. xxiv. Michael Gullick has identified the script of this manuscript as that of an early twelfth-century scribe of Bury St Edmunds, demonstrating that this text was known at Bury in the generation after the physician-abbot Baldwin.

The notion that the history of the abbey of Bury St Edmunds after the Norman Conquest was unusual is not new. William of Malmesbury in his Gesta pontificum described St Edmund as ‘the first of the saints of the country’. And in the Gesta regum he wrote that the saint's abbey was remarkable both for its capacity to attract patronage and to repulse tax-collectors:

A monk of the great Ile-de-France abbey of Saint-Denis, Abbot Baldwin of Bury St Edmunds (1065–97) was the one non-Englishman to be an abbot in England on the day that Harold lost the Battle of Hastings. He had first visited England well before his appointment to Bury in 1065 and been treated with great favour by King Edward.

The medieval persona of St Edmund, as far as it can be recovered, is generally recognised to have resided in Abbo of Fleury's Passio sancti Eadmundi. Written at the request of the monks of Ramsey at the end of the tenth century, this text was swiftly adopted by the Benedictine community at Bury, where it appears to have been recorded in a booklist from the 1040s, and from whose scribes three eleventh-century copies survive. The Passio was undoubtedly a creative stimulus for the local community, for it gave rise both to the famous cycle of illuminations in the twelfth-century illustrated libellus, now New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M. 736, and to an important collection of eleventh-century chants for St Edmund's feast, which forms the basis of this chapter. Even Bury's late eleventh-century hagiographer Herman owed a debt to Abbo: in alluding to the story of the Passio, commenting on the general shortage of other available accounts, and apparently fashioning his own Miracula as a continuation of that narrative. One might be forgiven for assuming, therefore, that the St Edmund portrayed by Abbo's Passio – the humble, peace-loving figure characterised by Antonia Gransden as a model of Christian kingship – was the very same St Edmund known to the monks of Bury.

Introduction

In comparison with the large number of manuscripts at Saint-Denis from the Carolingian period and the twelfth century, the sources for the eleventh century, the time of Abbot Baldwin of Bury St Edmunds, are meagre. This is one indication that the abbey suffered severe losses in the tenth century at the hands of the Normans. It lost many of its domains, the fabric of the church seems to have deteriorated greatly, and the performance of the liturgy seems to have become lax.

Abbot Suger, writing in the 1140s, saw the division of the Carolingian empire under the sons of the son of Louis the Pious, that is, Charles the Bald, as the major reason for Saint-Denis's losses. In addition to the problem the monks faced in recovering their illustrious past, the monastery encountered two major challenges to its prestige in the first half of the eleventh century. First of all, the monks at Saint Emmeram, Regensburg, claimed that they had the relics of St Denis. In response to this, the saint's body was exhumed in 1053, and a new feast, the Detection of Saint Denis, was celebrated on 9 June to commemorate this event. Secondly, the bishop of Paris challenged Saint-Denis's claims of exemption from episcopal control. So it is perhaps not surprising that the extant manuscripts and charters from the eleventh century reflect both of these topics: charters were forged to prove the monastery's independence from episcopal control, and manuscripts were created for its new liturgical celebrations.

An accurate picture of the architectural history of Abbot Baldwin's church began to emerge already in the middle of the nineteenth century, as for example with Graham Hills's study of 1865. The first person to make sense of the remains on the site as a whole was Arthur Whittingham, with the research he published in the early 1950s, and many aspects of the subject were investigated further at the conference of the British Archaeological Association of 1994, organized by Antonia Gransden. In the present essay I want to examine three things: the contrast between the Norman church and its Anglo-Saxon predecessors; how relations between the abbey and the diocese in the late eleventh century may be reflected in changes in the plan of the church; and the relationship between the plans of the abbey and the town.

The Contrast between the Norman Church and its Anglo-Saxon Predecessors

According to Abbo of Fleury, when St Edmund's body arrived in Beodricesworth (before c. 950), the faithful of the vill built a very large wooden church to receive it. Nothing is recorded of its shape. Cnut and Emma supported the building of a church which was begun about 1020 and consecrated in 1031 or 1032, the new work, according to Herman, being carried out in stone.

In the late 1060s, a cleric, possibly the bishop of Amiens, wrote a poem on the Norman Conquest. It represented William the Conqueror as a hero worthy of Troy, rightfully claiming a kingdom; but it also depicted him as a warrior revelling in gore, enthralled to the god Mars. The poet told of how venerable age and beautiful youth lay mingled in death on the battlefield and how William camped at Dover where the vanquished came to seek terms and kiss his feet, ‘just as flies … throng in swarms to sores full of blood’. Blood was impure in the eyes of the religious. A drop of blood was enough to desecrate a sanctuary. The taint of blood from intercourse rendered a priest unfit to say Mass, and to shed the blood of a Christian was to shed the blood of Christ. The mordant analogy of those sores full of blood – the Normans – marching upon Westminster, where their leader would be sacramentally anointed, should have troubled the conscience of the king the poet pretended to flatter. His subtext betrays horror and the expectation of penance. Comparable pressure came from the Norman bishops who imposed penance on William and his troops.

Some ten years ago I identified an eleventh-century Continental medical manuscript in the British Library (Sloane 1621) as a hitherto unrecognised Bury book. It is a small book of several contemporary parts that is interesting for its content, its many contemporary, near-contemporary, and early twelfth-century additions by Continental and English scribes, and the likelihood that it should be linked to Baldwin, abbot of Bury between 1065 and 1097. Its content is discussed by Debby Banham in the following chapter, and therefore what follows is concerned mostly with the physical and scribal features of the manuscript, and the conclusions concerning its origin and provenance that can be drawn from them.

At the beginning of Sloane 1621 is a preliminary quire, formerly of four leaves but now with its first leaf lost (fols 2–4), of slightly later date than what follows. The quire contains medical prayers and three short texts concerning the monochord in two Anglo-Continental hands, probably of the early twelfth century, the second of which also made an addition on the last leaf of the manuscript proper (fol. 111r). There is little reason to doubt that the quire was an early addition to the manuscript, for its format (arrangement and number of lines) suggests that it was made with the intention to put it before what follows. At the top of what is now the opening page (fol. 2r) is a one-word twelfth-century title repeated by the same scribe (antidotarius), and this is an adequate description of the content of the manuscript proper, suggesting that the preliminary quire was in its present position by at least 1200, if not before.