Bury Saint Edumnds is a very historic city in East Anglia, not far from Cambridge. I took the train there for the afternoon to look around and visit the site where the ancient Benedictine abbey once stood. The streets downtown were paved with cobblestones and lined with brick stores.
The large Cathedral of Bury Saint Edmunds dominates the heart of the city. It was built fairly recently--as a kind of replacement for the old abbey, which was once a powerful center of both religion and politics in medieval England. It was at the Abbey of Bury Saint Edmunds that King John was forced to sign the Magna Carta.
And it was at the Abbey of Bury Saint Edmunds that the body of St. Edmund the martyr, the holy king of East Anglia, was laid to rest. After being besieged by invading Danes, King Edmund was shot with arrows and then beheaded. Legend says that a wolf guarded the king's head in the forest until his people could bury his body with proper rites. This little sculpture of the wolf and the head of the holy king comes from the bishop's throne inside the cathedral.
The shrine holding St. Edmund's body was destroyed long ago, and the location of his bones are unknown today. Inside the cathedral, however, there is a chapel with a candle burning in honor of the king.
Here is the cathedral nave.
Continuing towards the high altar, you come to the crossing. This is a view of the beautiful painted vault. Below, you can see the coats of arms of all the bishoprics in England affixed to the sides of the tower.
This is a view looking past the altar at the crossing and into the choir.
Having entered the choir, if you look up there are more painted vaults and an organ. The cathedral had a mirror that you could look into in order to see the painting without getting a cramp in your neck!
Outside the cathedral is a fabulous old graveyard with thin headstones covered in white and orange lichen.
There is also an ancient Norman tower decorated with interlace and animal heads.
The cathedral borders on a large park filled with gardens. There were school groups and families out walking and eating cheap Cornish pasties. They smelled good, but for only a pound fifty, they can't have tasted like much--maybe it's good they were sold out when I tried to buy one!
Here is a hedge of lavender in the rose garden. Nearby there was a monastic medicine garden planted with herbs that were cultivated to treat patients in the Middle Ages. The plantings are based on notations and inventories in a medieval manuscript from Bury Saint Edmunds.
This was a nice view looking through the roses towards the gray walls of the cathedral.
And here are the remains of the old abbey that once controlled the city. The little plaque on the central pier identifies the approximate spot where the Magna Carta was signed. There were delinquent kids everywhere, and I'm sorry to say that they kind of destroyed the medieval atmosphere, making a lot of noise and spitting at each other. Don't they know that they're in the ruins of a church?
Back in Cambridge graduation was going on. There were proud aristocratic parents everywhere beaming beside students dressed in fur-trimmed graduation robes. I'm serious about that, too. There was actually white fur on the graduation stoles of some of the students!
I took this picture while standing in line for another evensong at King's College Chapel. I got used to the order of the services with the sung prayers and psalms and the Magnificat anthem. I tend to like the older settings of the texts, but one time they sang a modern Magnificat that was pretty spectacular--the piece got quieter and quieter until the note of the final "amen" shimmered in space for a few moments after they finished singing, and then faded away into the reverent silence of the chapel.
We had Indian food for dinner that night with Diana and her friends. Of course you have to have Indian food while in England--even though it's been decades since India won its independence, the culinary effects of colonization linger on!
No comments:
Post a Comment