What is the connection to Bury St Edmunds?
The Abbey of St Edmund was founded as a Benedictine Monastery by King Cnut, or Canute, in 1021. Under Edward the Confessor it became wealthy when he gave the abbot the right to rule the whole of West Suffolk on behalf of the crown, along with the income that such privileges brought. In 1065 the abbey was lucky enough to gain a reforming and energetic Norman-French abbot called Baldwin. It therefore survived the 1066 Conquest unscathed and by 1100 was one of the largest and wealthiest of English religious houses. An inventory of 1046 listed 51 books in the abbey, and some of them may have been produced on site. After 1065, although Baldwin was a great builder, he does not seem to have given any great priority to book production. By the 1080’s Bury had a contingent of monks from Bec, in Normandy, in their community. They may have helped to encourage an expanded scriptorium in the abbey, where texts were not just copied but illustrated anew, but output was not great. The monk Anselm becam
