St. Edmund had been 30 years dead when they brought his remains to Bury 1100 years ago. His sometimes savage miracles and the many riots against his Abbey endowed the town not only with riches but with both neurosis and notoriety. Its central streets. unchanged to this day, were laid out by a couple of Norman abbots and modernised by the genteel taste of the 18th. century, the two periods of its greatest fame. A remarkable story of frivolity and conflict, brutality and charity, religious fervour and secular greed.