Bury Saint Edmund, Suffolk, England.

I am a history junkie. It is fascinating and exciting to me that I will stand on the ground where the rule of trial by jury was born, or at least nourished. This place could be considered to be the birthplace of our American Constitution. The nobles of England met here in 1214 and swore to force their King to sign a document, the Magna Carta, that listed several dozen rights that the King was obligated to give his subjects. The King did not intend to honor the document and it took years of conflict to validate the document. We are still watching and on occasion have to straighten out the executive branch (King) of our government. Could it be true that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom?

In the eleventh and twelfth century the abbey at the shrine of Saint Edmund was one of the largest in Europe. The abbey owned a third of Suffolk. The reformation ended the power of the abbey.

For a lot of my life I have read about the Magna Carta. The signing was the next year, 1215, in a meadow at Runnymede.