Edmund's shrine drew pilgrims, and the pilgrims drew wealth, and the wealth built a Benedictine abbey that became one of the most powerful in medieval England. Around 1080, Abbot Baldwin laid out a grid of streets around the abbey precinct, one of the first deliberately planned medieval towns in the country. The pattern, broad streets meeting at right angles around the abbey gates, is still legible when you walk the town centre today. Inside the precinct walls, the monks held jurisdiction over everything: market rights, justice, even the right to mint coin. Canute had freed the abbey from episcopal control in 1020. Edward the Confessor made the abbot lord of the franchise. For centuries Bury was effectively a monastic city-state in the Suffolk fields.

In November 1214, twenty-five English barons met inside the abbey church, ostensibly to celebrate the feast of St Edmund. In fact they had come to plot. King John had lost Normandy, taxed them ruinously, broken his coronation oath. The barons swore on the high altar that they would compel him to confirm the rights of free men or make war on him. The following June at Runnymede, sword-points at the king's throat, they got what they had sworn in Bury to demand: Magna Carta. The abbey is in ruins now, dissolved by Henry VIII, picked over for stone for four centuries, but the gardens around the ruins are quiet and grass-covered, and a plaque marks where the barons knelt. The town motto reads: sacrarium regis, cunabula legis. Shrine of a king, cradle of the law.

What survived the Reformation became Anglican. St James's church was raised to cathedral status in 1914 when the Diocese of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich was formed. Its Gothic-revival central tower, completed in 2005, was the last major Anglican cathedral tower built in England, constructed using original techniques by six masons who placed each machine-cut stone by hand. Nearby, St Mary's holds the tomb of Mary Tudor, Queen of France and favourite sister of Henry VIII. She was buried first in the abbey, then dug up after her brother dissolved it, and reinterred at St Mary's. Queen Victoria, three centuries later, paid for the stained glass window above her. The town's other peculiar landmark is Britain's first internally illuminated street sign, the 1935 Pillar of Salt, marking the terminus of the A1101, the country's lowest road, mostly below sea level.

Bury's history is not only saints and kings. On 18 March 1190, two days after the more famous pogrom at Clifford Tower in York, the people of Bury St Edmunds attacked the town's Jewish community and killed fifty-seven men, women and children. Later that year, Abbot Samson petitioned King Richard I for permission to expel the survivors, on the grounds that everything in the town belonged by right to St Edmund. The expulsion came a full century before Edward I banished all Jews from England in 1290. Between 1599 and 1694, the town was also a setting for witch trials. The historic peace of Bury's gardens sits on a foundation that includes ordinary people murdered by their neighbours.

Bury's modern landmarks are industrial. Greene King, founded here in 1799, brews from a long brick complex near the river. Its tied pub The Nutshell, in the town centre, claims to be Britain's smallest. The British Sugar factory on the A14, built in 1925, processes the sugar beet of 1,300 East Anglian growers. During harvest, 660 lorry-loads arrive every day. The factory has its own power station that supplies around 110,000 homes, and on some days the air over town smells faintly of burnt starch. Stephen Fry's grandfather Martin Neumann came from Czechoslovakia to manage the refinery in its early years, escaping the rise of Nazism. The story is recounted in his grandson's episode of Who Do You Think You Are. Sugar, beer, a cathedral, an abbey, and a king who refused to bend.