From This Part Of The Country, I Returned North-West By Lenham, To
Visit St. Edmund's Bury, A Town Of Which Other Writers Have Talked
Very Largely, And Perhaps A Little Too Much.
It is a town famed
for its pleasant situation and wholesome air, the Montpelier of
Suffolk, and perhaps of England.
This must be attributed to the
skill of the monks of those times, who chose so beautiful a
situation for the seat of their retirement; and who built here the
greatest and, in its time, the most flourishing monastery in all
these parts of England, I mean the monastery of St. Edmund the
Martyr. It was, if we believe antiquity, a house of pleasure in
more ancient times, or to speak more properly, a court of some of
the Saxon or East Angle kings; and, as Mr. Camden says, was even
then called a royal village, though it much better merits that name
now; it being the town of all this part of England, in proportion
to its bigness, most thronged with gentry, people of the best
fashion, and the most polite conversation. This beauty and
healthiness of its situation was no doubt the occasion which drew
the clergy to settle here, for they always chose the best places in
the country to build in, either for richness of soil, or for health
and pleasure in the situation of their religious houses.
For the like reason, I doubt not, they translated the bones of the
martyred king St. Edmund to this place; for it is a vulgar error to
say he was murdered here.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 69 of 136
Words from 19654 to 19920
of 39569
