Magna Carta 800 – Out and About in Bury St Edmunds
Mark and Tom
On Friday 24 October we were both in Bury St Edmunds for a stakeholder engagement meeting organised by the Magna Carta 800th Committee. The Magna Carta Trust has received £1m of direct funding from the Treasury in advance of the 800th anniversary of the ‘Great Charter’ in 2015. The Committee is chaired by Sir Robert Worcester, the founder of the polling organisation MORI (now Ipsos-MORI), and is charged with the distribution of the Treasury grant to groups and communities that are marking the anniversary of Magna Carta in some way. The Heritage Lottery Fund is also supporting a number of projects linked to Magna Carta, and the Fund was represented at the meeting.
Most of the meeting was taken up by representatives of organisations and communities telling the audience what they are doing to mark the octocentenary of the charter. We heard from Bury St Edmunds itself, Durham cathedral and Lincoln cathedral, all of which have various events planned in association with the anniversary. Runnymede itself, of course, was also represented.
But many other communities are also celebrating Magna Carta in their own way. One intriguing example is Odiham in Hampshire, where activities will include a choral concert in All Saints’ Church at which a choral concert will mark the premiere of a new, specially commissioned Magna Carta Anthem. Odiham will also host a flower festival and an art festival, guided walks around King John’s Castle, an archery contest and a medieval ale festival. This last event was of particular interest to us – for a recent discussion of ale, see an earlier blog post.
Our own brief presentation on the ‘Redress of the Past’ project attracted considerable interest from those present, including one attender who had been in a historical pageant herself. We heard of impending pageants and similar activity in Wraysbury. It was also a good opportunity to advertise the exhibition that we are helping to mount in Moyse’s Hall, Bury St Edmunds, in 2015.
In the evening, many of those who attended the meeting were given a tour of the Bury St Edmunds Magna Carta light and sound show – a series of installations in various places across the town. These featured actors reading from Magna Carta, interspersed with speeches from other, more recent defenders of liberty, notably Nelson Mandela. In Charter Square, we saw scenes from the 1907 and 1959 pageants – both of which depicted Magna Carta – projected onto the walls of the modern shopping centre. Recently the 1907 Magna Carta episode was re-enacted and filmed by local children, and this scene was also projected, and the accompanying dialogue also played.
The show ended in the spectacular ruins of the abbey. We made a brief detour to see the memorial to the 1959 pageant. It was interesting to see the historical relics of pageantry in the city, as well as the many reminders of Magna Carta. We are very grateful to our project partners at St Edmundsbury Heritage Service, and particularly to Alan Baxter, who has made the forthcoming exhibition possible, and who guided us around the light and sound show.