Learning about the Franciscans in Bury St Edmunds

 

A Franciscan Friar, illustration from Piers Plowman, a manuscript of 1427 in the Bodleian Library, (Douce 104, fol 046r)

A talk about a no-longer-existing Franciscan Church in Bury St Edmunds, on a cold winter’s night was, perhaps, not the most enticing of prospects. Yet Francis Young’s talk was fascinating from start to finish. 

The talk, at Moyses Hall Museum, was based around Young’s newly published translation and editing of documents relating to the Franciscans in Bury St Edmunds [The Franciscans in Medieval Bury St Edmunds: Suffolk Records Society, Charters XXII, 2023). For those not familiar with Bury St Edmunds, site of one of the most powerful Benedictine abbeys in England, the presence of the Franciscans will come as a surprise. There is virtually no trace of their presence to be seen today: just a street name (Friars Lane) and a few fragments in a modern hotel (the aptly named Best Western Priory Hotel). The speaker stated that written records of the Franciscans in England, and in Bury, are very scant compared to the wealth of documentation available for the Abbey, yet he was able to bring the Franciscans to life, to provide fascinating documentation around the charters, and to raise (for me) a whole host of questions. 

One moment from their history puts into perspective all my innocent ideas of medieval monasticism: in 1257, the Abbey monks descended on the Franciscan quarters in Friar Lane, and pulled the house down, beating the friars with cudgels, so determined were they that the Friars should not be allowed to create a base within the town. The speaker explained that the house was most likely wattle and daub, so not so difficult to demolish, but even so … Eventually, the Friars were granted an area outside the city, and outside the jurisdiction of the Abbey, according to Francis Young the largest Franciscan friary in England by area. 

Although unwelcome to the monks, the friars claimed they could manage the spiritual concerns of the town better than the monks. That’s just one of the startling claims or questions raised. Other fascinating angles of inquiry include:

• If the Friars were mendicants, surviving from day to day on donations, how did they manage such a large estate, with around 30-35 friars? If the Friars were in English for over 300 years, they must presumably have set up some kind of infrastructure for managing their buildings and land.
• The Friars were very keen to get involved with education, and so had a presence in Oxford and Cambridge. Does this mean they were more influential in the universities than the monastic  orders?
• Friars could travel while monks (as a general rule) could not.
• The Friary in Bury had links with Richard, Duke of York, while the Abbey was linked to the House of Lancaster.

It seems incredible that records of the early Franciscans can be so sparse, even if, as Young states, records of the English Franciscans were almost all lost, while abbey records tended to remain intact after the Dissolution. I imagine there must exist some records of friary life, just as the monks of Bury have the account of Jocelyn of Brakelonde, dating from the late C12.

I know so little about religious history, limited to visiting old and picturesque historical sites in the countryside, and I know even less about English medieval history, so I don’t have any immediate answer to these questions. But it is a tribute to Francis Young that a sparse set of records related to a demolished building in medieval Bury St Edmunds should have raised so many questions, and such a different view of medieval monasticism than the impression of austerity and devotion that peaceful ruins surrounded by trees would suggest.

Attacking your religious rivals, and tearing down their accommodation, is not quite what I expected of Benedictines.