Bury St. Edmunds No. 4 / Bedrisworth / Beodericsworth / St. Edmundsbury

There is an entry for Bury [St Edmund's] in the Domesday survey [http://domesdaymap.co.uk/place/] [accessed 25 September 2016]; it mentions 30 priests in it, no doubt as part of the abbey contingent. An object resembling the font of a baptismal font serves now [July 2013] as garden planter in Knowton Park, south of Busy St. Edmunds; the object is a quadrangular basin inside and out; each lower-half corner is decorated with a rose inscribed in circle, the flower rendered as a Tudor rose; the basin now rests on a pile of cemented rubble. Local sources claim this is an old font from the Parish Church of St. James, now the cathedral for the Church of England's Diocese of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich. Without close examination and documentation on its origin, it can be said that the object resembles the basin of a medieval baptismal font except for the floral carving, which is late-medieval or later; if the object were indeed medieval it is possible that the decoration could have been the result of re-carving at the time of the church's main expandion in the 16th century (such cases of re-carving or re-tooling of an old font to suit later tastes are common in England). [cf. Index entries for Bury St. Edmunds No. 2 and 3 for other fonts of this church].