East Anglia

The kingdom of the East Angles, rich, early, and destroyed twice over. It occupied Norfolk and Suffolk, protected by fen and forest, and was one of the first English kingdoms to matter: Raedwald, who died around 624, was recognised as overlord of the southern English and is the likeliest occupant of the Sutton Hoo ship burial, whose helmet, gold shoulder-clasps and Byzantine silver revealed a society far wealthier and better connected than historians had assumed before its excavation in 1939. The kingdom's Christianity came from both Roman and Irish directions and produced Felix of Burgundy's see at Dommoc and the monastery of Fursey. It was repeatedly beaten by Mercia, which killed three East Anglian kings in the seventh century, and slipped into Mercian overlordship. Independence briefly returned in 825 when it turned to Wessex. The Great Heathen Army landed here in 865, wintered, and returned in 869 to kill King Edmund - shot with arrows and beheaded by the account that survives - after which the kingdom became Danish territory. Edmund's cult made Bury St Edmunds one of the great English pilgrimage sites, and he was England's patron saint before George. Edward the Elder reconquered the region by 917. It survived afterwards only as an earldom. Sutton Hoo lies beside the river Deben in Suffolk. The kingdom's wealth came partly from control of North Sea trade. Rendlesham has recently been identified as a royal settlement. Norwich later grew into one of medieval England's largest cities. The Sutton Hoo helmet is one of only four complete Anglo-Saxon helmets ever found. Ely and Bury St Edmunds became the region's great abbeys.

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