List of monarchs of East Anglia

Edmund, king of the East Angles, who was killed during the invasion of his kingdom by the Great Heathen Army

The Kingdom of East Anglia, also known as the Kingdom of the East Angles, was a small independent Anglo-Saxon kingdom that comprised what are now the English counties of Norfolk and Suffolk and perhaps the eastern part of The Fens. The kingdom was one of the seven traditional members of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy. The East Angles were initially ruled (from the 6th century until 749) by members of the Wuffingas dynasty, named after Wuffa, whose name means 'descendants of the wolf'.^[1] The last king was Guthrum II, who ruled in the 10th century. After 749 East Anglia was ruled by kings whose genealogy is not known, or by sub-kings who were under the control of the kings of Mercia. East Anglia briefly recovered its independence after the death of Offa of Mercia in 796, but Mercian hegemony was soon restored by his successor, Coenwulf.^[2] Between 826 and 869, following an East Anglian revolt in which the Mercian king, Beornwulf, was killed, the East Angles again regained their independence. In 869 a Danish army defeated and killed the last native East Anglian king, Edmund the Martyr.^[3] The kingdom then fell into the hands of the Danes and eventually formed part of the Danelaw.^[3] In 918 the East Anglian Danes accepted the overlordship of Edward the Elder of Wessex. East Anglia then became part of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of England.

Many of the regnal dates of the East Anglian kings are considered unreliable, often being based upon computations. Some dates have presented particular problems for scholars: for instance, during the three-year-long period of apostasy that followed the murder of Eorpwald, when it is not known whether any king ruled the East Angles.^[4] The main source of information about the early history of the kingdom's rulers is Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People.^[5]

Chronological list

See also

• Anglo-Saxon England portal

References

1. Higham 1999, pp. 154–155.
2. Yorke 2002, p. 121.
3. Jones 1973, p. 421.
4. Colgrave & Mynors 1969, book II, chapter 15.
5. Hoggett 2010, pp. 24–27.
6. Fryde et al. 1986, p. 8.
7. Nennius 2008, p. 46.
8. Yonge 1853, p. 269.
9. Lapidge 1999, pp. 508–509.
10. Yorke 2002, p. 67.
11. Swanton 1997, p. x.
12. Yonge 1853, p. 277.
13. Kirby 2000, p. 74.
14. Swanton 1997, p. 28.
15. Hill & Worthington 2005, p. 128.
16. Ashley 1998, p. 244.
17. Yorke 2002, p. 64.
18. Kirby 2000, p. 164.
19. Brown & Farr 2001, pp. 5, 135.
20. McKitterick 1995, p. 555.
21. Kirby 2000, p. 179.
22. Brown & Farr 2001, p. 219.
23. Yorke 2002, p. 122.
24. Brown & Farr 2001, p. 222.
25. Giles 1858, p. 115.
26. Yorke 2002, p. 59.
27. Lapidge 1999, p. 223.
28. Ashley 1998, p. 246.
29. Stenton 1988, pp. 321–22.
30. Jaques 2007, p. 1006.

Works cited

• Ashley, Michael (1998). British Monarchs: the Complete Genealogy, Gazetteer, and Biographical Encyclopedia of the Kings & Queens of Britain. London: Robinson. ISBN 978-1-8548-7504-4.
• Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, ed. and tr. Colgrave, Bertram; Mynors, Roger AB (1969). Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0-1982-2202-5.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
• Higham, N.J. (1999). "East Anglia, Kingdom of". In M. Lapidge; et al. (eds.). The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England. London: Blackwell. ISBN 978-0-6312-2492-1.
• Brown, Michelle P.; Farr, Carol Ann (2001). Mercia: an Anglo-Saxon Kingdom in Europe. London, New York: Leicester University Press. ISBN 978-0-8264-7765-1.
• Fryde, E. B.; Greenway, D. E.; Porter, S.; Roy, I. (1986). Handbook of British Chronology (3rd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-5215-6350-5.
• Giles, John Allen (1858). The whole works of King Alfred the Great. London: Bosworth & Harrison. OCLC 659908076.
• Hill, David; Worthington, Margaret (2005). Aethelbald and Offa: two eighth-century kings of Mercia : papers from a conference held in Manchester in 2000 (British Archaeological Reports British Series). Manchester: Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies. ISBN 978-1-8417-1687-9.
• Hoggett, Richard (2010). The archaeology of the East Anglian conversion. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell. ISBN 978-1-8438-3595-0.
• Jaques, Tony (2007). Dictionary of Battles and Sieges: a Guide to 8,500 Battles from Antiquity through the Twenty-First Century. Vol. 3. Westport, USA: Greenwood. ISBN 978-0-3133-3539-6.
• Jones, Gwyn (1973). A History of the Vikings. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-1928-0134-0.
• Kirby, D. P. (2000). The Earliest English Kings. London and New York: Routledge. pp. 67, 74. ISBN 978-0-4152-4211-0.
• Lapidge, M.; et al., eds. (1999). "Kings of the East Angles". The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England. London: Blackwell. pp. 508–509. ISBN 978-0-6312-2492-1.
• McKitterick, Rosamund, ed. (1995). The New Cambridge Medieval History, Volume 4, Part 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-5213-6292-4.
• Nennius (2008) [9th century]. Giles, John Allen (ed.). Historia Brittonum [The History of the Britons]. Forgotten Books. ISBN 978-1-6062-0992-9.
• Stenton, Frank (1988). Anglo-Saxon England. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-1982-1716-9.
• Swanton, Michael (1997). The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-4159-2129-9.
• Yonge, C. D. (1853) [14th century]. The Flowers of History [Flores Historiarum]. Vol. 1. London: Bohn.
• Yorke, Barbara (2002). Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon England. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-4151-6639-3.

Further reading

• Astley, Mike (1998). The Mammoth Book of British Kings & Queens. New York: Carroll & Graff. ISBN 978-0-7867-0692-1.
• Keary, Charles Francis (1887). Poole, Reginald Stuart (ed.). A Catalogue of English Coins in the British Museum. Anglo-Saxon Series. Vol. 1. London: British Museum.
• Newton, Sam (1993). The Origins of Beowulf and the Pre-Viking Kingdom of East Anglia. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer. ISBN 978-0-85991-472-7.