John Lydgate Kneeling At the Shrine Of St. Edmund, In John Lydgate's 'Lives of St. Edmund and St. Fremund', etc.

Bury St. Edmunds was the burial place of St. Edmund, a Saxon King of East Anglia, martyred in 869 by Viking invaders who had also martyred St. Fremund in 866. John Lydgate (probably from Lidgate, about 10 miles south-west of Bury), a monk of the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds and one of the most prolific writers of Middle English, translated this work from Latin into English. Nothing survives of the medieval shrine of St. Edmund, but we can get some idea of its appearance from this image: it is very likely that the makers of this manuscript would have seen the shrine themselves.