BURY ST EDMUNDS, a market town and municipal and parliamentary borough of Suffolk, England, on the Lark, an affluent of the Great Ouse; 87 m. N.E. by N. from London by the Great Eastern railway. Pop. (1901) 16,255. It is pleasantly situated on a gentle eminence, in a fertile and richly cultivated district. The tower or church-gate, one of the finest specimens of early Norman architecture in England, and the western gate, a beautiful structure of rich Decorated work, together with ruined walls of considerable extent, are all that remains of the great abbey. St Mary's church, with a beautifully carved roof, was erected in the earlier part of the 15th century, and contains the tomb of Mary Tudor, queen of Louis XII. of France. St James's church is also a fine Perpendicular building, with a modern chancel, and without a tower. All these splendid structures, fronting one of the main streets in succession, form, even without the abbey church, a remarkable memorial of the wealth of the foundation. Behind them lie picturesque gardens which contain the ruins, the plan of which is difficult to trace, though the outlines of some portions, as the chapter-house, have been made clear by excavation. There is a handsome Roman Catholic church of St Edmund. The so-called Moyses Hall (perhaps a Jew's House, of which there is a parallel example at Lincoln) retains transitional Norman work. The free grammar school, founded by Edward VI., has two scholarships at Cambridge, and six exhibitions to each university, and occupies modern buildings. The Church Schools Company has a school. There are large agricultural implement works, and the agricultural trade is important, cattle and corn markets being held. In the vicinity is Ickworth, the seat of the marquess of Bristol, a great mansion of the end of the 18th century. The parliamentary borough, which returns one member, is coextensive with the municipal borough. The town is governed by a mayor, 6 aldermen and 18 councillors. Area, 2947 acres.
Bury St Edmunds (Beodricesworth, St Edmund's Bury), supposed by some to have been the Villa Faustina of the Romans, was one of the royal towns of the Saxons. Sigebert, king of the East Angles, founded a monastery here about 633, which in 903 became the burial place of King Edmund, who was slain by the Danes about 870, and owed most of its early celebrity to the reputed miracles performed at the shrine of the martyr king. By 925 the fame of St Edmund had spread far and wide, and the name of the town was changed to St Edmund's Bury. Sweyn, in 1020, having destroyed the older monastery and ejected the secular priests, built a Benedictine abbey on its site. In 942 or 945 King Edmund had granted to the abbot and convent jurisdiction over the whole town, free from all secular services, and Canute in 1020 freed it from episcopal control. Edward the Confessor made the abbot lord of the franchise. By various grants from the abbots, the town gradually attained the rank of a borough. Henry III. in 1235 granted to the abbot two annual fairs, one in December (which still survives), the other the great St Matthew's fair, which was abolished by the Fairs Act of 1871. Another fair was granted by Henry IV. in 1405. Elizabeth in 1562 confirmed the charters which former kings had granted to the abbots, and James I. in 1606 granted a charter of incorporation with an annual fair in Easter week and a market. Further charters were granted by him in 1608 and 1614, and by Charles II. in 1668 and 1684. The reversion of the fairs and two markets on Wednesday and Saturday were granted by James I. in fee farm to the corporation. Parliaments were held here in 1272, 1296 and 1446, but the borough was not represented until 1608, when James I. conferred the privilege of sending two members. The Redistribution Act 1885 reduced the representation to one. There was formerly a large woollen trade.
See Richard Yates, Hist. and Antiqs. of the Abbey of St Edmund's Bury (2nd ed., 1843); H.R. Barker, History of Bury St Edmunds.
BUSBECQ, OGIER GHISLAIN DE [Augerius Gislenius] (1522-1592), Flemish writer and traveller, was born at Comines, and educated at the university of Louvain and elsewhere. Having served the emperor Charles V. and his son, Philip II. of Spain, he entered the service of the emperor Ferdinand I., who sent him as ambassador to the sultan Suleiman I. the Magnificent. He returned to Vienna in 1562 to become tutor to the sons of Maximilian II., afterwards emperor, subsequently taking the position of master of the household of Elizabeth, widow of Charles IX., king of France, and daughter of Maximilian. Busbecq was an excellent scholar, a graceful writer and a clever diplomatist. He collected valuable manuscripts, rare coins and curious inscriptions, and introduced various plants into Germany. He died at the castle of Maillot near Rouen on the 28th of October 1592. Busbecq wrote Itinera Constantinopolitanum et Amasianum (Antwerp, 1581), a work showing considerable insight into Turkish politics. This was published in Paris in 1589 as A.G. Busbequii legationis Turcicae epistolae iv., and has been translated into several languages. He was a frequent visitor to France, and wrote Epistolae ad Rudolphum II. Imperatorem e Gallia scriptae (Louvain, 1630), an interesting account of affairs at the French court. His works were published
at Leiden in 1633 and at Basel in 1740. An English translation of the Itinera was published in 1744.
See C.T. Forster and F.H.B. Daniel, Life and Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq (London, 1881); Viertel, Busbecks Erlebnisse in der Turkei (Gottingen, 1902).
BUSBY, RICHARD (1606-1695), English clergyman, and head master of Westminster school, was born at Lutton in Lincolnshire in 1606. He was educated at the school which he afterwards superintended for so long a period, and first signalized himself by gaining a king's scholarship. From Westminster Busby proceeded to Christ Church, Oxford, where he graduated in 1628. In his thirty-third year he had already become renowned for the obstinate zeal with which he supported the falling dynasty of the Stuarts, and was rewarded for his services with the prebend and rectory of Cudworth, with the chapel of Knowle annexed, in Somersetshire. Next year he became head master of Westminster, where his reputation as a teacher soon became great. He himself once boasted that sixteen of the bishops who then occupied the bench had been birched with his "little rod". No school in England has on the whole produced so many eminent men as Westminster did under the régime of Busby. Among the more illustrious of his pupils may be mentioned South, Dryden, Locke, Prior and Bishop Atterbury. He wrote and edited many works for the use of his scholars. His original treatises (the best of which are his Greek and Latin grammars), as well as those which he edited, have, however, long since fallen into disuse. Busby died in 1695, in his ninetieth year, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, where his effigy is still to be seen.
BUSBY, the English name for a military head-dress of fur. Possibly the original sense of a "busby wig" came from association with Dr Busby of Westminster; but it is also derived from "buzz", in the phrase "buzz wig". In its first Hungarian form the military busby was a cylindrical fur cap, having a "bag" of coloured cloth hanging from the top; the end of this bag was attached to the right shoulder as a defence against sword-cuts. In Great Britain "busbies" are of two kinds: (a) the hussar busby, cylindrical in shape, with a bag; this is worn by hussars and the Royal Horse Artillery; (b) the rifle busby, a folding cap of astrachan, in shape somewhat resembling a "Glengarry" but taller. Both have straight plumes in the front of the headdress. The word "busby" is also used colloquially to denote the tall bear-and-raccoon-skin "caps" worn by foot-guards and fusiliers, and the full dress feather bonnet of Highland infantry. Cylindrical busbies were formerly worn by the artillery engineers and rifles, but these are now obsolete in the regular army, though still worn by some territorial and colonial troops of these arms.
BUSCH, JULIUS HERMANN MORITZ (1821-1899), German publicist, was born at Dresden on the 13th of February 1821. He entered the university of Leipzig in 1841 as a student of theology, but graduated as doctor philosophiae, and from 1847 devoted himself entirely to journalism and literature. In 1851 he went to America, but soon returned disillusioned to Germany, and published an account of his travels. During the next years he travelled extensively in the East and wrote books on Egypt, Greece and Palestine. From 1856 he was employed at Leipzig on the Grenzboten, one of the most influential German periodicals, which, under the editorship of Gustav Freytag, had become the organ of the Nationalist party. In 1864 he became closely connected with the Augustenburg party in Schleswig-Holstein, but after 1866 he transferred his services to the Prussian government, and was employed in a semi-official capacity in the newly conquered province of Hanover. From 1870 onwards he was one of Bismarck's press agents, and was at the chancellor's side in this capacity during the whole of the campaign of 1870-71. In 1878 he published the first of his works on Bismarck—a book entitled Bismarck und seine Leute, während des Krieges mit Frankreich, in which, under the form of extracts from his diary, he gave an account of the chancellor's life during the war. The vividness of the descriptions and the cleverness with which the conversations were reported ensured a success, and the work was translated into several languages. This was followed in 1885 by another book, Unser Reichskanzler, chiefly dealing with the work in the foreign office in Berlin. Immediately after Bismarck's death Busch published the chancellor's famous petition to the emperor William II. dated the 18th of March 1890, requesting to be relieved of office. This was followed by a pamphlet Bismarck und sein Werk; and in 1898 in London and in English, by the famous memoirs entitled Bismarck: some Secret Pages of his History (German by Grunow, under title Tagebuchblätter), in which were reprinted the whole of the earlier works, but which contains in addition a considerable amount of new matter, passages from the earlier works which had been omitted because of the attacks they contained on people in high position, records of later conversations, and some important letters and documents which had been entrusted to him by Bismarck. Many passages were of such a nature that it could not be safely published in Germany; but in 1899 a far better and more complete German edition was published at Leipzig in three volumes and consisting of three sections. Busch died at Leipzig on the 16th of November 1899.
See Ernst Goetz, in Biog. Jahrbuch (1900).