"Property and Protest: Bury St Edmunds, 1300-1450"

The paper sheds new light on the property market in the English medieval town of Bury St. Edmunds. The core of the town was controlled by the Abbot who, unusually, served the king by raising an army, when necessary, from the knights who occupied the extensive lands around the town.
Drawing on rentals and a range of other sources, the paper investigates the connection between the rents and fines attaching to properties in the town and the civil unrest which bedevilled the town over the period 1300-1450. It argues that it was not the urban poor who protested against living conditions in the town but the wealthy rural gentry who had acquired property in the town and challenged the abbey’s control of the property market.
Bury St Edmunds is famous as the burial place of St Edmund, King of East Anglia. martyred by invading Vikings in 636. It developed in four main stages; first as a small port on the River Lark; then as a Norman abbey town with a planned grid of streets; in the thirteenth century it acquired suburbs, and in the nineteenth century it attracted agricultural processing industries, including a major brewery. Unusually, 80 per cent of the medieval town survives largely untouched.
The rentals inform on the differences between the richer and poorer part of the medieval town and in the sizes of the residences therein. It is possible to identify the zoning of the town, with the creation of a special luxury market place, intended for wealthy pilgrims to St Edmund’s shrine, as distinct from the local market for the peasantry and the poorer residents of the town.
Previous studies of the medieval town have focused ecclesiastical issues, which means that the wealth of surviving information on property rents has been largely neglected until now.