M R James at Bury St Edmunds

 M R James' Ghost Stories are a treat to read, and can still send a tingle down the spine, couched as they are in James' buttoned up English voice of the 1930s.It's his restraint and economy of words which hints at hidden horrors in the lives of his characters and the things they are gradually and unexpectedly uncovering. The stories were only a sideline to his professional life as a medievalist scholar, but they made his name very well known to the reading public.  Visting Bury St Edmunds recently to see my sister, I took a walk through the ruins of the once large and influential Benedictine monastery in the town, and was pleasantly surprised to see James' name on one of the display boards at the site of the Chapter House. He was a key player in discovering, from his research, that six former abbots of the monastery were buried there. It led to an excavation at the turn of the 1900s. No wonder that James was able to turn his hand to Christmas ghost stories, because he had a large reservoir of detailed medieval knowledge which he was able to creatively re-work. One such story springs to mind:  'The Treasure of Abbot Thomas'.