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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’.
However fair and large the new construction was, however, this early corn exchange was destroyed in 1608, during the Great Fire of Bury. This disaster was dramatically described in a puritanical London pamphlet as ‘The Woefull and Lamentable wast and spoile done by a suddaine Fire in S. Edmonds-bury in Suffolke, on Munday, the tenth of Aprill. 1608… The lead of the Market crosse and the crosse itself, was utterly ruinate and consumed to the ground by the violent blow of this hot encounter’.
The market’s fortunes soon revived, however, and by 1620 the old corn exchange had been replaced by a new timber-framed Market Cross, of which several engravings survive. From these, we can see that it was a detached, two-storey timber building with an open-arcaded corn exchange on the ground floor and a galleried clothiers’ hall above, surmounted by a cupola or belfry. Set over its balcony were the royal arms of James I – a powerful expression of both civic pride and loyalty to the Crown, and part of a wider fashion for building new market halls during the reign of James I, particularly in the years 1609-1622. This would not be the Bury Market Cross’ last association with patriotic sentiments – but more on that later. It was, however, the last timber incarnation of the Bury building. A handful of broadly contemporary survivors can still be seen at sites including Dunster in Somerset (1609), Llanidloes in Powys (1612), Market Harborough in Leicestershire (1614), Ledbury in Herefordshire (1617), and Wymondham in Norfolk (1617), but for the most part wooden market crosses were replaced by (or in Bury encased in) later stone buildings.
The play’s the thing
What of the more literally dramatic history of the cross, as mentioned at the start of this article? Bury St Edmunds’ relationship with theatre dates back to the late 14th century, beginning with mystery plays presented by the Guild of Corpus Christi and continuing with Elizabethan strolling players performing in the galleried yards of local inns. By the early Georgian period, these mobile troupes had developed into visiting ‘companies of comedians’, performing in civic buildings or makeshift theatrical booths around the town. In January 1734, the Bury Corporation created a more permanent, purpose-built performance space, converting the upper floor of the Market Cross into a playhouse and creating what might be the earliest municipal theatre in England.
This innovative space became a home for His Grace the Duke of Grafton’s Company of Comedians (later the Norwich Company of Comedians), a respected group of performers including some of the greatest actors, actor-managers, and playwrights of their day, who toured East Anglia and visited the Bury Fair, one of the most fashionable events of the Georgian social calendar, every autumn. During such visits, the Bury playhouse might even claim to have inspired Elizabeth Inchbald, one of the foremost English dramatists of the 18th century, who was born in the town and closely followed the Norwich Company before running away to London aged 18 to launch her own career. A small collection of playbills, printed and distributed by the Norwich Company to advertise their forthcoming productions in 1776-1802, survive in the Suffolk Archives, and from these we can see that the Market Cross hosted stagings of Inchbald’s comedies, farces, and sentimental dramas, as well as performances by the satirist and actor Samuel Foote (hailed in his day as ‘the English Aristophanes’), and the celebrated Irish actress Eliza O’Neill, whose beauty was said to have caused men to be borne fainting from the theatre.
By June 1774, however, the playhouse was in need of repairs – which is where Robert Adam enters the story. Adam was an influential figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, and his ‘Adam Style’ – with its harmony of interiors, exteriors, and furnishings, and its light and lively neoclassical designs – became the most fashionable architectural style of the age. He had already designed (or redesigned) grand country residences like Harewood House in Yorkshire (1759-1771) and Syon House in Middlesex (1762-1769; see CA 382), as well as central London piles like Wynn House on St James’s Square (1772-1774) and Derby House on Grosvenor Square (1773-1774). His personal interest in theatre would also lead him to redesign the Theatre Royal on London’s Drury Lane in 1775.
Adam must have seemed the perfect person for the Corporation to approach about designing a new façade for the Market Cross, and his proposed neoclassical scheme is preserved in a beautifully drawn pen-and-ink elevation at Moyse’s Hall Museum. While the Corporation had originally only intended to reface the principal, south side of the building (presumably for reasons of cost), in the following months a much more ambitious plan to transform the entire structure began to emerge. Four of Adam’s pencil drawings (three elevations and a ground plan) are held in Sir John Soane’s Museum where, as mentioned above, they provided the inspiration for my own research. They show an enlarged neoclassical scheme with a cruciform plan, partially encasing the old timber-framed Market Cross, which was to be refaced in Adam Style. Some of the earlier building’s principal timbers were retained, however, and were exposed once more during alterations in the early 1970s.
A patriotic playhouse
Let us now turn from documentary to material evidence, exploring the fabric of the current Market Cross building. Its rusticated, pale yellow Ketton limestone ground floor and white Suffolk brick upper storey, topped by a stone cornice, are typical of Adam Style – as are neoclassical touches including Venetian windows, Ionic aediculae (niches) and decorative swags, paterae (ornamental dishes), and Etruscan vases. In keeping with theatrical tradition, the building is adorned as well with two pairs of stone panels depicting a variety of musical instruments, weapons, and keys surrounding comic and tragic masks. The comedy panels have one more fascinating detail: the indistinct outline of a page of musical notation which has been interpreted as eight bars of ‘God Save Our Lord the King’, beginning with the line ‘Send him victorious’. If true, this would be the earliest-known representation in stone of the National Anthem.
The author and composer of ‘God Save the King’ is unknown, but it was supposedly created (as a patriotic song: it would not be called the National Anthem until the early 19th century) in support of George II during Bonnie Prince Charlie’s Jacobite uprising. Adam’s inclusion of musical notation on the Market Cross reflects the traditional association between public performance and singing of the National Anthem, which originated in the Georgian theatre. Indeed, the first recorded public singing of ‘God Save the King’ was in a theatre – specifically, the Theatre Royal on Drury Lane, as news of George II’s defeat at the 1745 Battle of Prestonpans reached London.
As for the Bury playhouse’s interior, which was redesigned by Adam too, sadly little remains of its Georgian design, and it is difficult today to imagine it fully furnished with stage, pit, boxes, and gallery. The Market Cross’ prominence as a performance space was superseded by Bury’s Theatre Royal, which opened in 1819, and it subsequently saw such diverse uses as a concert hall (which housed an exhibition of wax sculptures by Anna Maria ‘Marie’ Tussaud in 1825, and a performance by Franz Liszt in 1840), a town hall, and an art gallery. Today, however, the building stands with its upper storey locked and empty, and its ground floor serving a purpose at odds with its historical significance: a betting shop.
Last year marked the 250th anniversary of Bury Corporation commissioning Robert Adam to redesign the Market Cross. His version of the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane has long since been demolished, but here in Bury stands one of the few remaining examples of Adam’s theatre work. It would be highly fitting if the passing of this important anniversary were to signal the renaissance of what the celebrated architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner dubbed ‘the finest post-medieval building in Bury’.
Further reading:
Adrian Tindall, The Story of Bury St Edmunds Market Cross (Crumps Barn Studio, £9.99, ISBN 978-1915067432).
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