On Cornhill, at the corner of Bury St Edmunds’ Great Market, stands an elegant neoclassical building: the town’s Market Cross. Designed by the influential Scottish architect Robert Adam, this structure recently celebrated its 250th birthday in its present form. Despite its mercantile name, its more recent history is distinctly theatrical. When I first encountered the colourful past of the cross, I was actually researching one of its neighbours: James Oakes’ Georgian townhouse in nearby Guildhall Street, which was designed by Adam’s contemporary, Sir John Soane, in 1789-1790. While browsing the collections of Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, I came across four of Adam’s original pencil drawings of the Market Cross – precisely detailed sketches that piqued my interest. As an archaeologist, they inspired me to dig deeper into the history of this building, and last year I published my research to mark the anniversary of Adam’s original commission in 1774 (see ‘Further reading’ below).
To put the cross in its historical context, Bury St Edmunds’ Great Market was probably laid out in the early 11th century by Anselm, abbot of the great Benedictine abbey of St Edmund, under a royal grant of Henry I. Originally covering a vast area of some 1.6ha, this space reflected the economic power of the abbey and the agricultural wealth of its hinterland. The market cross, too, was medieval in origin. The earliest forms of such structures were simple wooden, cruciform constructions, positioned at the centre or the highest point of the town’s marketplace. They were intended to serve several purposes: preaching the gospel, issuing public proclamations, witnessing acts of penance, sheltering corn-sellers, and providing a visible symbol of the Christian principles of fair trade.
In the later medieval period, most timber market crosses were succeeded by more elaborate, stepped stone structures (surviving examples can be found at Alfriston in Sussex, Bedale in North Yorkshire, and, more locally to Bury, at Lavenham in Suffolk), but, by the 16th century, wood was once again the material of choice. Many market crosses were replaced by wooden shelters, as at Oakham in Rutland, and these were sometimes lead-roofed, like the example at Mildenhall in Suffolk. This was also the case in Bury where, in 1583, the stones of the old Market Cross were sold by the Guildhall Feoffees (charitable forerunners of the corporation) for £2, and replaced with what the Feoffment records describe as ‘a very fayer large house for cornsellers… wherein they may stand to their great ease verye comodiouslye in the heate of Somer and also in the tyme of reynye and cold wet winter’.
