The Anglo-Saxon kingdom of the North Folk and South Folk: ruled by the Wuffing kings of Rædwald and Sutton Hoo, conquered by the Great Heathen Army in 869, ruled by Danish kings under Guthrum, and absorbed into England by Edward the Elder in 917.
East Anglia was the kingdom of the East Angles, the 'north folk' and 'south folk' whose names survive in Norfolk and Suffolk, bounded by the North Sea, the Wash, and the fens and forests of the western border. It was one of the leading English kingdoms of the early seventh century, when its king Rædwald was overlord of the southern English and may have been the man buried in the great ship at Sutton Hoo.
It lost its independence twice. Mercian kings dominated it through much of the eighth century, and in 869 the Great Heathen Army killed its last English king, Edmund, later venerated as a martyr. For almost fifty years it was a Danish kingdom, first under Guthrum, and in 917 it submitted to Edward the Elder and became part of the English kingdom.
The East Anglian royal house traced its descent from Wuffa, from whom it took its name, the Wuffingas; its early generations are known only from later genealogies. Its first well-documented king, Rædwald, who died around 624, became overlord of the English south of the Humber after defeating Æthelfrith of Northumbria on the River Idle in about 616. Bede reports that Rædwald accepted baptism in Kent but kept an altar to the old gods beside his Christian one.
The mound cemetery at Sutton Hoo, near Woodbridge, excavated in 1939, shows the wealth of that court. Its great ship burial held the Sutton Hoo Helmet, a sceptre, gold and garnet shoulder clasps and a great gold buckle, silver from the Byzantine world and coins from Merovingian Gaul, and it is widely, though not certainly, identified as Rædwald's grave. Later kings, Sigeberht and Anna among them, made East Anglia a Christian kingdom with a bishopric at Dommoc, and Anna's daughter Æthelthryth founded the abbey of Ely in 673.
East Anglia's kings struggled against their larger western neighbour. King Anna was killed fighting Penda of Mercia around 654, and Mercian kings controlled the kingdom for much of the eighth century. In 794 Offa of Mercia had the East Anglian king Æthelberht beheaded, a killing that made Æthelberht a saint venerated at Hereford. The East Angles broke free in 825, when their king defeated and killed Beornwulf of Mercia, and they kept their independence until the Vikings came.
The kingdom looked across the North Sea. Gipeswic, modern Ipswich, grew in the seventh century into one of the first English trading towns, dealing with Frisia and the Rhineland, and its potters made the wheel-thrown Ipswich ware found across eastern England. The church spread with the trade: the see founded for Bishop Felix at Dommoc was divided around 673, when a second bishopric was created at North Elmham to serve Norfolk.
The Great Heathen Army landed in East Anglia in 865 and wintered there, and the East Angles made peace with it by supplying horses. It returned in 869 and wintered at Thetford, and when King Edmund fought it he was defeated and killed on 20 November. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says only that the Danes killed the king and conquered all the land.
Within a century the story had become a martyrdom. Abbo of Fleury, writing about 986 from an account he traced back to Edmund's own armour-bearer, told how Ivar and Ubba had the king tied to a tree, shot with arrows and beheaded when he refused to renounce his faith, and how a wolf guarded the severed head. Edmund's cult grew at Bury St Edmunds, and the Danish rulers of East Anglia themselves struck pennies in his memory within about thirty years of his death.
In 880 Guthrum's army came from Cirencester and settled East Anglia, sharing out the land. Guthrum, baptised as Æthelstan after his defeat at the Battle of Edington, ruled as a Christian king, struck coins in his baptismal name and agreed with Alfred the Great the treaty that fixed the boundary between their kingdoms. He died in 890 and, by later tradition, was buried at Hadleigh in Suffolk.
His successor Eohric joined the rebel West Saxon prince Æthelwold in an invasion of Mercia and Wessex and was killed at the Holme in 902, in a battle the Danes won at the cost of their king. The East Anglian Danes fought on until 917, when Edward the Elder's forces killed their king at Tempsford and took Colchester, and the army of East Anglia submitted to Edward and accepted him as lord.