Around the corner from the cathedral is an enormous church dedicated to St Mary. Bury St Edmunds was originally the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Beodricsworth and was established around our church around 600-700AD on a site nearer to the river.
In 869, King Edmund refused to renounce his Christian faith and was killed by Viking invaders. His body was brought to St Mary’s Church, where it was soon venerated in a new shrine.
When King Henry VIII’s favourite sister, Mary Tudor, once queen consort of France, died in 1533, her body was re-buried in St Mary’s Church in 1538, after the abbeys of England were dissolved.
