The Franciscans in Medieval Bury St Edmunds

Chronicles the conflict between Franciscan friars and Benedictine monks in medieval Bury St Edmunds and the subsequent community at Babwell

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A volume of translated documents chronicling the conflict between Franciscan friars and Benedictine monks in medieval Bury St Edmunds and the subsequent Franciscan community at Babwell


Between 1233 and 1263 Franciscan friars engaged in a fierce confrontation with one of the most powerful abbeys in western Christendom, St Edmunds Abbey. Bringing together the documents that describe the sometimes violent and destructive conflict, which was litigated in both the royal court and the papal curia, this volume traces the history of the Franciscan presence at Bury St Edmunds both before and after the friars established a permanent home at Babwell Fen outside the town's North Gate in 1265. The controversy created by the arrival of mendicant friars was one of the major religious events of thirteenth-century Europe; the events in Bury are the best evidenced in England, and among the most richly documented mendicant-monastic conflicts in Europe. The volume includes documents produced by the monks of St Edmunds, the royal chancery, the papal curia and the friars themselves, chronicling a mendicant community that continued to challenge and disrupt the authority of the Abbey over Bury St Edmunds.