ABSTRACT
The plan of the town of Bury St Edmunds is remarkable. It dates mainly from the late 11th century, with some Saxon elements. The development of a new town, largely erasing the previous settlement, is parallel to the building of the huge abbey church, according to a general layout enlarged in the 12th century. The design of the west part of the town probably belongs to a tradition of laying-out towns established at Rouen in Normandy in the early loth century, and used continuously until the end of the 12th century. This paper analyses some continental Norman towns in this tradition, and compares Bury St Edmunds to them. It proposes a chronology for the development of the town of Bury between the Conquest and the end of the 12th century, concluding that the town may have been conceived under abbot Anselm and sacrist Hervey as a gigantic shrine, so to speak, for the St Edmund’s body.
