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Kingdom of East Anglia

The Kingdom of the East Angles (Old English: Ēastengla Rīċe; Latin: Regnum Orientalium Anglorum), informally known as the Kingdom of East Anglia, was a small independent kingdom of the Angles during the Anglo-Saxon period comprising what are now the English counties of Norfolk and Suffolk and perhaps the eastern part of the Fens,[1] the area still known as East Anglia.

Kingdom of the East Angles
Old English: Ēastengla Rīċe
Latin: Regnum Orientalium Anglorum

Independent (6th century–794; 796–c. 799; 825–869)
Client state of Mercia (794–796; c. 799–825)
Part of the Danelaw (869–917)

Anglo-Saxon paganism (before 7th century)
Christianity (after 7th century)

 

6th century

917

The kingdom formed in the 6th century in the wake of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain and was one of the kingdoms of the Heptarchy. It was ruled by the Wuffingas dynasty in the 7th and 8th centuries, but the territory was taken by Offa of Mercia in 794. Mercia control lapsed briefly following the death of Offa but was reestablished. The Danish Great Heathen Army landed in East Anglia in 865; after taking York it returned to East Anglia, killing King Edmund ("the Martyr") and making it Danish land in 869. After Alfred the Great forced a treaty with the Danes, East Anglia was left as part of the Danelaw.


It was taken back from Danish control by Edward the Elder and incorporated into the Kingdom of Wessex in 917.

Old East Anglian dialect[edit]

The East Angles spoke Old English. Their language is historically important, as they were among the first Germanic settlers to arrive in Britain during the 5th century: according to Kortmann and Schneider, East Anglia "can seriously claim to be the first place in the world where English was spoken."[42]


The evidence for dialects in Old English comes from the study of texts, place-names, personal names and coins.[43] A. H. Smith was the first to recognise the existence of a separate Old East Anglian dialect, in addition to the recognised dialects of Northumbrian, Mercian, West Saxon and Kentish. He acknowledged that his proposal for such a dialect was tentative, acknowledging that "the linguistic boundaries of the original dialects could not have enjoyed prolonged stability."[44] As no East Anglian manuscripts, Old English inscriptions or literary records such as charters have survived, there is little evidence to support the existence of such a dialect. According to a study by Von Feilitzen in the 1930s, the recording of many place-names in Domesday Book was "ultimately based on the evidence of local juries" and so the spoken form of Anglo-Saxon places and people was partly preserved in this way.[45] Evidence from Domesday Book and later sources suggests that a dialect boundary once existed, corresponding with a line that separates from their neighbours the English counties of Cambridgeshire (including the once sparsely-inhabited Fens), Norfolk and Suffolk.[46]

Ecclesiastical History of the English People

,

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

The Tribal Hidage, where the East Angles are assessed at 30,000 , evidently superior in resources to lesser kingdoms such as Sussex and Lindsey.[52]

hides

Historia Brittonum

Life of Foillan, written in the 7th century

No East Anglian charters (and few other documents) have survived, while the medieval chronicles that refer to the East Angles are treated with great caution by scholars. So few records from the Kingdom of the East Angles have survived because of a complete destruction of the kingdom's monasteries and disappearance of the two East Anglian sees as a result of Viking raids and settlement.[49] The main documentary source for the early period is Bede's 8th-century Ecclesiastical History of the English People. East Anglia is first mentioned as a distinct political unit in the Tribal Hidage, thought to have been compiled somewhere in England during the 7th century.[50]


Anglo-Saxon sources that include information about the East Angles or events relating to the kingdom:[51]


Post-Norman sources (of variable historical validity):

List of monarchs of East Anglia

; Farr, Carol Ann (2001). Mercia: an Anglo-Saxon Kingdom in Europe. London, New York: Leicester University Press. ISBN 978-0-8264-7765-1.

Brown, Michelle P.

, ed. (1992). The Age of Sutton Hoo: the Seventh Century in North-Western Europe. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. ISBN 978-0-85115-361-2.

Carver, M. O. H.

Fisiak, Jacek (2001). "Old East Anglian: a problem in Old English dialectology". In Fisiak, Jacek; Trudgill, Peter (eds.). East Anglian English. Boydell and Brewer. :10.1017/9781846150678. ISBN 978-1-84615-067-8.

doi

Hadley, Dawn (2009). "Viking Raids and Conquest". In (ed.). A Companion to the Early Middle Ages: Britain and Ireland, c. 500–c. 1100. Chichester: Blackwell. ISBN 978-1-4051-0628-3.

Stafford, Pauline

Hoggett, Richard (2010). . Woodbridge: The Boydell Press. ISBN 978-1-84383-595-0.

The Archaeology of the East Anglian Conversion

(1986) [1911–1919]. Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde [Encyclopedia of Germanic Antiquity] (in German). Vol. 6 (2nd ed.). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co. ISBN 978-3-11-010468-4.

Hoops, Johannes

Kirby, D. P. (2000). The Earliest English Kings. London and New York: Routledge.  978-0-415-24211-0.

ISBN

(1988) [1943]. Anglo-Saxon England. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-821716-9.

Stenton, Sir Frank

(2002). Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon England. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-16639-3.

Yorke, Barbara

Warner, Peter (1996). The Origins of Suffolk. Origins of the Shire. Manchester: Manchester University Press.  978-0-7190-3817-4.

ISBN

Williams, Gareth (2001). "Mercian Coinage and Authority". In Brown, Michelle P.; Farr, Carol Ann (eds.). Mercia: an Anglo-Saxon kingdom in Europe. Leicester: Leicester University Press.  978-0-8264-7765-1.

ISBN

Grossi, Joseph (2021). . Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ISBN 978-14875-0-573-8.

Angles on a Kingdom: East Anglian Identities from Bede to Ælfric

Metcalf, D. M. (2000). (PDF). British Numismatic Journal. 70: 1–11.

"Determining the mint-attribution of East Anglian Sceattas through regression analysis"

(1972). "The pre-Viking age church in East Anglia". Anglo-Saxon England. 1. Cambridge University Press: 1–22. doi:10.1017/S0263675100000053. JSTOR 44510584. S2CID 161209303.

Whitelock, Dorothy

52°30′N 01°00′E / 52.500°N 1.000°E / 52.500; 1.000