Bury St Edmunds historian Martyn Taylor looks at Babwell Friary’s origins in 1262, up to present day Priory Hotel site

In 1262, Gilbert De Clare – a great supporter of the Franciscan order of friars – gave land at Babwell Fen, outside the Banleuca (the Abbey’s jurisdiction of the town), for the friars to settle, which became the Babwell Friary.

The Franciscans had come to Bury St Edmunds in 1238, but met with hostility from the Abbot, who twice removed them from an area we know today as Friars Lane. He was very much against the popular friars, as potentially they would be a rival to the abbey’s Benedictine order – even the townspeople left bequests to the friars.

In 1289, Thomas De Weyland, a disgraced judge, sought sanctuary at Babwell under an assumed name, but fled when his identity was discovered and had to leave England.

By 1300, there were around 40 friars based at the Babwell Friary. As they were Mendicants, from the Latin mendicant meaning ‘beggar’, they travelled about preaching, not actually endearing themselves to the abbey.

In 1327, bitter riots in the town against the abbey’s taxes and controlling influence were led by a merchant, John de Berton, who was illegally elected Alderman and, with Gilbert Barbour and a mob, attacked the Abbeygate, destroying it.

Subsequently they were captured and imprisoned in Norwich but escaped to seek sanctuary in Babwell Friary. On leaving the Friary they kidnapped Abbot Draughton, who was freed two years later. Ultimately Barbour and Berton were arrested, the latter died in prison.

A factitious account written in 1861 by Margeretta Greene, called The Secret Disclosed, tells of the murder of Humphrey the good Duke of Gloucester in 1447 by the nun Maude Carew, who via a fictitious tunnel from the friary entered the nearby St Saviours Hospital and poisoned him. In doing so she spilt poison on herself, dying. She became the Grey Lady, Bury’s premier ghost!

The friary was closed in 1538 by Henry VIII and rented out to Anthony Harvey for 10 shillings per annum.

A private house was then built on the site by the Boldero family, extending on to Mildenhall Road. Owned by the Cullum family from the late 18th century onwards, this amalgam of a house was enlarged and rented out until the breakup of the Cullum Estate in the 1920s.

Later Alderman Olle, twice mayor and who incidentally organised the town’s coronation celebrations of 1937 and 1953 and commissioned the magnificent Magna Carta plate for the town, lived there, holding fund-raising fetes in the garden until the house was sold to become The Priory Hotel in 1976.

Popular owner Edward Cobbold’s extensions to the hotel in 1990 had an archaeological dig uncover foundations of the friary church, a simple rectangular building, along with 23 burials. One with a chalice and paten was found, possibly belonging to Robert Windell, once Suffragan (assistant) Bishop of Norwich. He died in 1441, but his will of 1411 requested that he be buried at Babwell.

In 1998, the hotel was bought by Eagle Hotels Ltd and four years later the hotel became The Priory Hotel Ltd, later to be part of the Cameron Ventures Group, though still advertising itself as a Best Western Hotel.