Category Archives: Historical

Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, UK

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And now for something completely different. While in the UK, we did a good bit of sightseeing. From Inverness to Long Melford we put some serious miles on our vehicles and saw some incredible places along the way. I have most of the places we visited below, although I could easily be forgetting a few.

Northern Scotland and the highlands.
Southern Scotland into northern England.
After we moved to March, in Cambridgeshire. These are the ones closest to home.
And a bit further afield.
And from furthest north to furthest south.

While we were living in Cambridgeshire we went to Bury St. Edmunds and visited the abbey ruins there. Even though we had already seen a dozen or more ancient abbeys that were in better shape than this one, our visit to these ruins made an impression. We had already visited Jedburgh Abbey and St. Andrews Cathedral as well as a few castles that were around the same age as these ruins, but on this sunny and beautiful day it hit me that these ruins (nearly 1000 years old) had people just sitting and having a nice lunch and a chat on them.

People having lunch and a chat at the ruins.

The casualness of this interaction stunned me even though we had been visiting castles and ruins for a year. I had not become familiar enough with these ancient buildings and ruins to see them as anything but objects to be revered and honoured, so I thought it was amazing that they could just be seen as a beautiful space to relax and chill.

One thing that bugged me for a while was the name Bury St. Edmunds. Why was there a verb in the name and wasn’t it a bit morbid? Well, come to find out that the Bury comes from an earlier form of the English ‘borough’ or German ‘burg’ and means fortress or stronghold. The town was initially called Beodricsworth until the remains of the martyred king St. Edmund were moved there, then it became St. Edmundsbury and then Bury St. Edmunds. I later found that there are a few other places in the UK with Bury in front.

One bit of historical trivia that caught my eye was that the abbey is connected to the Magna Carta.

Another interesting tidbit is that we only stumbled on this as we were going to Lavenham to check out a couple of antique shops. And Lavenham is going to be the subject of another post.

Oak Coffer Observations, Part Three

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This post continues from my previous. One of the things about this piece that caught my eye was the newspaper lining. At first, I wasn’t sure what it was because I was mostly interested in the exterior carving, patina, damage, and hardware. But after we got it home (our place in March, Cambridgeshire) I was able to take a closer look at the interior and realized that my hunch was right, and the newspaper lining was probably old as well.

The first thing I did was try to find a date, which ended up being September 21, 1872. I found a couple of other pages with the same date, so it is probably all the same issue of the same newspaper.

I then started looking at the layout of the newspaper within the coffer and realized that it was used not only to protect the contents of the coffer from snagging on the wood but also as a bit of decoration. This coffer was already 200 years old when the owners decided to line it so it’s likely that splinters and ragged edges would have ruined any fabrics that were stored inside.

I also found where the newspaper was from. Norwich, in Norfolk.

We purchased the coffer near Bury St. Edmunds, which is about 40 miles as the crow flies from Norwich, so in its 300 plus history, it probably didn’t stray far from where it was made.

The coffer was likely made in the mid to late 1600s, although there is no provenance and the construction methods did not change significantly between the 1400s and the 1700s except to include other woods like walnut or pine.

In the next post I’ll talk more about how the coffer was built.