St Edmundsbury Cathedral in Bury St Edmunds

St Edmundsbury Cathedral is a stunning mix of ancient and modern. A former parish church, it became Suffolk’s Cathedral in 1914 following the creation of the Diocese of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich. A modern expansion began when Stephen Dykes Bower was appointed architect in 1943.

With whitewashed walls and a stunning lantern tower, St Edmundsbury Cathedral presents a colourful and bright interior that visitors are often surprised by. The Cathedral’s tower was finished in 2005 and its crowning glory is the vaulted ceiling that rewards those who gaze upwards. (See my image below)

The Norman Tower, also known as St James' Gate, is the detached bell tower of St Edmundsbury Cathedral. Originally constructed in the early 12th century, as the gatehouse of the vast Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, it is one of only two surviving structures of the Abbey, the other being Abbey Gate, located 150 metres to the north. As a virtually unaltered structure of the Romanesque age, the tower is both a Grade I listed building and a Scheduled Ancient Monument. The tower is considered amongst the finest Norman structures in East Anglia.

The 16th century nave with 19th hammer beam roof by George Gilbert Scott.

The colourful wooden ceiling.

The ceiling of the sanctuary/tower area is a magnificent, painted and gilded fan-vaulted oak structure, completed in 2010 to finalize the Millennium Tower project. Shame, but I couldn`t get totally underneath it.

The baptismal font in St Edmundsbury Cathedral, Bury St Edmunds, was designed in 1870 by Sir Gilbert Scott, constructed on a medieval shaft, and features a prominent 19th-century cover, which I unfortunately didn`t get a very good image of. Another visit coming up I think. The font is designed to allow total immersion baptism, that`s as long as your a baby!

The beautiful West window in the Cathedral

The Susanna window

The oldest glass in the Cathedral, dating from about 1500, is now in the ‘Susanna window’ at the west end of the south aisle. The bottom half (above) shows the story from the Apocrypha of Susanna and the elders who hid in her garden and falsely accused her of adultery. When she was brought to trial, however, the young prophet Daniel defended her, exposing the inconsistencies in her influential accusers’ story and in the end it was they, not Susanna, who were stoned to death. This story was very popular in the sixteenth century and was set to music as a broadside ballad Constant Susan.  

Memorial to James Reynolds, Chief Justice of the Exchequer, d.1738. He was twice MP for Bury St Edmunds. He was made judge of the Court of King's Bench in 1725. George II made him Chief Baron in 1730.al before 1065, which was when Abbot Anselm rebuilt the existing St Denis's and dedicated the new church to Saint James. He was also responsible for building the abbey gate tower, known today as the Norman Tower, alongside St James's, which also served as the church's belfry and it continues in this function to the present day. This church is located about 200 yards from St Mary's Church, which is of a similar size.

At the far end of the North aisle in St Edmundsbury Cathedral, a set of steps to the left leads up to the choir-school. Before you turn off towards the school, however, you are faced, at the top of the stairs, with a tapestry that takes up the entire wall. It is a textile re-creation of a small illustration from a book by the poet-monk John Lydgate.

The image on which the tapestry is based is taken from Lydgate’s ‘The Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund’ which he translated from Latin into English as a gift for the 12 year old King Henry VI. It was a commemoration of the King’s visit to the Abbey from Christmas 1433 to Easter 1434 and depicts the boy-king himself kneeling before the shrine of St Edmund.

More than 560 years later, at the very dawn of the 21st century, the then dean of St Edmundsbury, the late James Atwell, had an idea to recreate Lydgate’s image as a huge tapestry – not just to make a work of art to enhance the newest areas of the cathedral, but also to gather stitchers from all over the diocese to work on it together and bring their focus, skill and dedication into the building.

The word went out across the county through village magazines, church bulletins and sewing clubs and a large working group was assembled – although, inevitably, it tailed off during the more than three years that the project took, leaving a hardcore team of embroiderers towards the end of the work.

Lydgate’s image was digitally expanded and squared-paper patterns were created with an intricate code of dots, lines, triangles and other cyphers in each little square to indicate what colour each stitch should be. In all there were forty-seven different colours of thread used, seventeen of which were shades of brown! Although mostly woollen thread, the sections that required the most luminosity and shine, namely the golden shrine and the young King himself, were worked in silk to help them catch and reflect the light. The stitches are single tent-stitches, rather than cross-stitches as can be seen by expanding the photo.

The stitchers worked from a weekly timetable, in shifts of three eye-boggling hours each, taking a 10 inch square of the pattern each time. Whenever a stitch was worked, it was crossed off on the paper pattern so that the person taking the next shift knew exactly where to pick up from. Occasionally someone was given the job of double checking that no stitch had been missed.

The huge work was divided up onto three separate looms to be reconstructed on completion, so that some sections could be worked off-site. The main central loom remained in the sacristy of the cathedral, though, and the stitchers came to work together on it. The project quickly became a social gathering as much as an artistic one.

The tapestry, finished at the end of 2005, is not only beautiful and a fabulous example of community endeavour, but it is also brings to life a wonderful depiction of a historical moment in time. If you wander the ruins of the abbey, you can, in one or two places, still see examples of the chequered tiles that are shown, here so beautifully worked in red and yellow wool, beneath the feet of the pilgrims.

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