On 18 March 1190, two days after the more well-known massacre of Jews at Clifford Tower in York, the people of Bury St Edmunds massacred 57 Jews. Later that year, Abbot Samson successfully petitioned King Richard I for permission to evict the town’s remaining Jewish inhabitants “on the grounds that everything in the town… belonged by right to St Edmund: therefore, either the Jews should be St Edmunds men or they should be banished from the town.” This expulsion predates the Edict of Expulsion by 100 years. In 1198, a fire burned the shrine of St Edmund, leading to the inspection of his corpse by Abbot Samson and the translation of St Edmund’s body to a new location in the abbey.