On 10 September 1224, nine men clad in the coarse grey habits that would give them their English nickname of Greyfriars landed at Dover – in a boat paid for by the abbey of Fécamp, as they had no money of their own. They were led by Agnellus of Pisa (c. 1195–1236), who was personally authorised to lead a mission to England by the Poor Man of Assisi himself, St Francis. Although the Franciscans were not the first mendicant friars in England – they were preceded by the Dominicans in 1221 – their arrival would profoundly disrupt English religious life and radically challenge existing structures of authority, even though they were initially welcomed by some traditional monasteries. While England's mostly Benedictine and Cistercian monks and Augustinian canons lived lives of stability, tied to monasteries endowed with land, the friars were committed to a radically precarious life of preaching, teaching and ministering to the poor. Over the next decade, the friars targeted densely populated areas for the establishment of friaries, eager to reach as many people as possible. Naturally enough, they were drawn to the rapidly expanding market town of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, just as they settled in Suffolk's other major towns of Ipswich and Dunwich.

Unlike Ipswich and Dunwich, however, Bury St Edmunds was not a town governed primarily by mercantile and civic interests. Since the early eleventh century, the town had been dominated by the vast Benedictine abbey of St Edmund, whose abbots had seen off challenges to their authority from the bishops of Norwich and, by the thirteenth century, enjoyed complete exemption from all ecclesiastical authority other than that of the pope himself, not just for themselves but for an area of about a mile in every direction from the abbey – the so-called banleuca of Bury St Edmunds. Within the banleuca, the abbot exercised both episcopal and royal authority, ruling what was in effect a monastic ‘statelet’ in western Suffolk. When the friars first arrived in Bury in 1233, the abbey was in possession of various privileges from Rome that were designed to prevent episcopal interference with the abbey or town of Bury St Edmunds; these privileges were not designed to protect against the new threat of the mendicants, who enjoyed a close relationship with the papacy.