Abbot Baldwin
Attempting to put the Conquest into perspective the relationship between those that had power in the era of
Edward the Confessor and the "arangements" that he made with the ecclesiastical community I wonder what the
role and powers of Abbot Baldwin were.
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Baldwin (died c. 1097) was a French monk and royal physician. He became a monk in France before coming to England to serve as
King Edward the Confessor's doctor. He served as a prior before becoming abbot of Bury St Edmunds in 1065. As abbot he promoted
the cult of Edmund the Martyr and secured the abbey's independence from the bishops of Thetford. He continued to serve as royal
physician to two more kings of England and also rebuilt parts of the abbey before dying around 1097.
The Bury Society - from the The Confessor’s Gift and Abbott Baldwin
Abbott is a spelling error and Abbott is an American pharmaceutical company.
By now the town with its own mint was called Seynt Eadmundes Byrig (St Edmundsbury) it did not need a castle to subdue its
inhabitants as Baldwin, a monk of St Denys in France had been elected abbot a year earlier. Baldwin began building the Abbey Church
in 1081 starting at the east end as was common practice. By the time of the compilation of Domesday in 1086 an astonishing 342
houses had been built on land that was previously under the plough, proper urban expansion. This may well be a result of the
required workforce for the construction of the Abbey Church. It has been commented on before, that the ancient medieval grid
of Bury St Edmunds by Baldwin makes it the earliest purposely laid-out Norman town in the country.
