Kingdom of East Anglia

• 1. Introduction

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  The Kingdom of East Anglia existed for roughly three and a half centuries before a Danish army erased it from the map in 869. It occupied what are now Norfolk and Suffolk, and perhaps the eastern reaches of the Fens, bordered by the North Sea to the north and east. At its peak, under a king called Rædwald, it commanded the allegiance of every Anglo-Saxon kingdom south of the Humber. How a small coastal realm in the corner of Britain rose to that kind of power, then collapsed twice over, is a story shaped by war, religion, and the relentless pressure of larger kingdoms pressing in from every direction. Who were the Wuffingas, the dynasty that held East Anglia through its greatest years? What happened when the Great Heathen Army arrived in 865? And how did the very language spoken in East Anglia come to have a claim on being the oldest English in the world?

• 2. Wolves and Wuffings

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  Wehha is listed as the very first king of the East Angles, followed by Wuffa, and the genealogy recorded in Anglo-Saxon sources traces their line all the way back to Woden via Caesar. The dynasty that descended from Wuffa took his name directly: Wuffingas, meaning "descendants of the wolf." That name may itself be a back-formation, invented to explain a dynasty name that already existed, rather than the reverse. The main documentary source for these earliest years is Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, written in the 8th century, and Bede was candid about how little he knew of the East Anglian kings, their chronology, and how long any of them reigned.

  What archaeology has supplied where documents failed are the ship burials at Snape and Sutton Hoo in eastern Suffolk. These concentrations of burial mounds point toward a centre of royal power even when no written record confirms it. Blair noted parallels between objects found under Mound 1 at Sutton Hoo and items discovered at Vendel in Sweden, suggesting a possible eastern Swedish royal ancestry for the Wuffingas. Later analysis, however, found that the items in question were most likely made in England, making a Swedish origin considerably less persuasive.

  The most powerful of all the Wuffingas was Rædwald, identified in the Ecclesiastical History as the son of Tytil, grandson of Wuffa. Bede described him as the overlord of all kingdoms south of the Humber, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle names him Bretwalda. In 616, he proved that title in battle, defeating and killing the Northumbrian king Æthelfrith at the Battle of the River Idle, and installing Edwin of Northumbria on the throne there. Scholars widely regard Rædwald as the individual honoured by the sumptuous ship burial at Sutton Hoo, near Woodbridge, though the identification remains scholarly consensus rather than confirmed fact.

• 3. A Kingdom Baptised

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  In 604, Rædwald became the first East Anglian king to accept baptism. His overlord, Æthelberht of Kent, had converted him to Christianity. What followed was an arrangement that struck contemporaries as extraordinary: Rædwald maintained a Christian altar in the same space where he continued to worship the old gods. From 616, when pagan rulers briefly reclaimed Kent and Essex, East Anglia under Rædwald was for a time the sole Anglo-Saxon kingdom with a baptised king on the throne.

  After Rædwald died in around 624, his son Eorpwald converted from paganism under the influence of Edwin of Northumbria, but the new religion met opposition at home. Eorpwald was killed by a pagan named Ricberht, and East Anglia reverted to paganism for three years. Christianity returned with Eorpwald's brother (or step-brother) Sigeberht, who had spent his exile in Francia and been baptised there. Sigeberht oversaw the foundation of the first East Anglian bishop's see, established for Felix of Burgundy at Dommoc, a place most scholars identify with Dunwich.

  Sigeberht later abdicated in favour of his kinsman Ecgric and retired to monastic life. The completeness of the Christian settlement can be measured by a simple absence: no East Anglian settlement survives with a name derived from the old pagan gods. The bishop Felix had arrived from Burgundy; the monk Foillan's life was recorded in a text written in the 7th century. A later sign of how thoroughly Christianity shaped the kingdom's self-image came with the cult of Edmund the Martyr, whose death in 869 quickly generated its own devotional geography at Beodericsworth, the town that would become Bury St Edmunds.

• 4. Under Mercian Shadow

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  Penda of Mercia ended Rædwald's legacy more decisively than any foreign invasion. In the early 640s, Penda defeated and killed both Ecgric and Sigeberht in battle; Sigeberht, though he had retired to a monastery, was still dragged from it to face the Mercian army. Despite his violent death, he was later venerated as a saint. Anna, who succeeded Ecgric, and Anna's son Jurmin were both killed in 654 at the Battle of Bulcamp, near Blythburgh. With those two deaths, Mercian dominance over East Anglia was effectively sealed.

  In 655, Æthelhere of East Anglia joined Penda's campaign against the Northumbrian king Oswiu. The gamble failed badly: the Battle of the Winwaed ended in catastrophic defeat for Mercia, and both Penda and his East Anglian ally Æthelhere were killed there. The last king of the Wuffingas line was Ælfwald, who died in 749. From the mid-7th to the early 9th century, Mercia built a hegemony stretching from the Thames to the Humber.

  In 794, Offa of Mercia had the East Anglian king Æthelberht executed and took the kingdom for himself. A brief reassertion of East Anglian independence under Eadwald in 796 was quickly suppressed by Offa's successor Coenwulf. Independence returned in 825, when Æthelstan led a successful rebellion against Mercian control. Beornwulf of Mercia died attempting to crush it, and his successor Ludeca met the same end in 827. The East Angles then appealed to Egbert of Wessex for protection, and Æthelstan acknowledged Egbert as his overlord, trading one form of external dominance for a considerably more comfortable one.

• 5. The Great Heathen Army

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  In 865, a force the sources call the Great Heathen Army landed in East Anglia. The Danes wintered there, secured horses, and then moved north to take York. They returned to East Anglia in 869, this time wintering at Thetford. King Edmund met them in battle, was defeated at a place called Hægelisdun, and was killed. He was buried at Beodericsworth, and his death transformed him: Edmund the Martyr became patron saint of the region, and the town that grew around his burial site took his name as Bury St Edmunds.

  From that point, East Anglia ceased to be an independent kingdom in any real sense. The Danes placed puppet-kings on the throne while they pressed their campaigns westward against Mercia and Wessex. Alfred the Great defeated the last active portion of the Great Heathen Army in 878, and the resulting treaty required the Danes to treat Christians equally. That same treaty, made between Alfred and Guthrum, acknowledged Guthrum's landholdings in East Anglia.

  Guthrum returned to East Anglia in 880 and, according to the medieval historian Pauline Stafford, "swiftly adapted to territorial kingship and its trappings, including the minting of coins." His kingdom probably included, beyond East Anglia proper, Cambridgeshire, parts of Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire, and Essex. The Scandinavian imprint on the landscape is still visible in place-names containing Old Norse elements such as '-thorp' and '-by'. A further peace treaty between Alfred and Guthrum was struck sometime in the 880s.

• 6. Edward's Reconquest

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  In 901, a figure named Æthelwold ætheling arrived in Essex after spending time in Northumbria. He was the cousin of Edward, King of Wessex, and had been driven into exile after a failed bid for the throne. Some or all of the Danes in England accepted him as their king, and he persuaded the East Anglian Danes to go to war against Edward in Mercia and Wessex. The enterprise ended in December 902 with the deaths of both Æthelwold and of Eohric of East Anglia in battle.

  From 911 to 917, Edward methodically expanded his control over England south of the Humber, building fortified positions called burhs in Essex and Mercia, often sited to control Danish use of rivers. In 917 the Danish position collapsed rapidly. A Danish king, probably from East Anglia, was killed at Tempsford. Danish reinforcements arrived from overseas, but their counterattacks were broken, and as Edward's army advanced, many of the Danes' English subjects defected. The Danes of East Anglia and of Cambridge surrendered.

  East Anglia was absorbed into the Kingdom of England in 918. Norfolk and Suffolk entered a new administrative unit, the earldom of East Anglia, in 1017, when Thorkell the Tall was made earl by Cnut the Great. The two old East Anglian bishoprics at Elmham and Dunwich were merged into a single see at North Elmham.

• 7. The Oldest English

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  East Anglia was settled by the Anglo-Saxons earlier than most other regions of Britain, possibly as early as the start of the 5th century. According to the linguists Kortmann and Schneider, East Anglia "can seriously claim to be the first place in the world where English was spoken." The East Angles, along with the Middle Angles, Mercians, and Northumbrians, were descended according to Bede from the people of Angeln, a region now in modern Germany.

  A. H. Smith was the first scholar to argue for the existence of a distinct Old East Anglian dialect, separate from the recognised dialects of Northumbrian, Mercian, West Saxon, and Kentish. Smith himself was cautious, acknowledging that the linguistic boundaries of the original dialects could not have stayed fixed for long. The difficulty is the near-total absence of primary evidence: no East Anglian manuscripts, Old English inscriptions, or charters have survived. Viking raids and settlement destroyed the kingdom's monasteries and extinguished both East Anglian bishop's sees, erasing most of the documentary record.

  What survives instead is indirect. A study by Von Feilitzen in the 1930s found that the place-names recorded in Domesday Book were "ultimately based on the evidence of local juries," preserving the spoken forms of Anglo-Saxon place and personal names. Evidence from Domesday Book and later sources points to a dialect boundary that once separated Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, and Suffolk from their neighbours, which corresponds almost exactly to the old kingdom's territory. The first reference to the East Angles as a distinct political unit appears in the Tribal Hidage, a document thought to have been compiled somewhere in England during the 7th century, where the East Angles are assessed at 30,000 hides, placing them well above lesser kingdoms such as Sussex and Lindsey.