Edmund

In Search of England's Lost King

Francis Young

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781788311793
• eBook ISBN: 9781786723611
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: British History

What buried secret lies beneath the stones of one of England's greatest former churches and shrines? The ruins of the Benedictine Abbey of Bury St Edmunds are a memorial to the largest Romanesque church ever built. This Suffolk market town is now a quiet place, out of the way, eclipsed by its more famous neighbour Cambridge. But present obscurity may conceal a find as significant as the emergence from beneath a Leicester car-park of the remains of Richard III. For Bury, as Francis Young now reveals, is the probable site of the body – placed in an 'iron chest' but lost during the Dissolution of the Monasteries – of Edmund: martyred monarch of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of East Anglia and, well before St George, England's first patron saint. After the king was slain by marauding Vikings in the ninth century, the legend which grew up around his murder led to the foundation in Bury of one of the pre-eminent shrines of Christendom. In showing how Edmund became the pivotal figure around whom Saxons, Danes and Normans all rallied, the author points to the imminent rediscovery of the ruler who created England.

‌Chapter 1

Angelcynn

Edmund’s People

To the modern traveller, the land which gave England its name is a short drive or train journey from London, and Norfolk and Suffolk seem to differ from neighbouring counties only in their lack of motorways and their network of infuriatingly narrow and meandering small roads. The traveller of a millennium and a half ago would have encountered a very different landscape. Today’s sedate streams, such as the rivers Stour and Waveney, were wide tidal waterways, impassable for the pedestrian but navigable far inland for seagoing vessels. The area we now call the Norfolk Broads was a huge peat bog taking up almost a third of Norfolk, while the flat fields of today’s northern Cambridgeshire simply did not exist; the vast undrained Fens, peppered with occasional islands, blended into the Wash and the North Sea beyond it, so that Norfolk and Suffolk were effectively a peninsula. Finally, a series of man-made earthworks – Devil’s Dyke, Black Ditches and Fleam Dyke – protected the most vulnerable approach to East Anglia from the south-west.1

Abbo of Fleury, Edmund’s earliest biographer, knew the landscape of East Anglia first-hand during his exile at Ramsey Abbey (then one of the islands in the Fens), but the French monk also gave a useful outsider’s perspective on what the region was like in the Anglo-Saxon era:

[East Anglia] is washed by waters on almost every side, girdled as it is on the south and east by the ocean, and on the north by an immense tract of marsh and fen, which starting, owing to the level character of the ground, from practically the midmost point of Britain, slopes for a distance of more than a hundred miles, intersected by rivers of great size, to the sea. But on the side where the sun sets, the province is in contact with the rest of the island, and on that account accessible; but as a bar to constant invasion by an enemy, a fosse sunk in the earth is fortified by a mound equivalent to a wall of considerable height.2

Well defended by the Fens and by impressive earthworks to the west, this big bump of flat land jutting into the North Sea, England’s most easterly point, has always been very vulnerable to seaborne invaders. In the late third century the Romans fortified the province of Britannia’s ‘Saxon shore’ – so-called because it faced the land of the barbarian Saxones in what is now the Netherlands and Germany – leaving behind massive yet enigmatic ruins at Burgh Castle, Brancaster, Caister-on-Sea and Walton Castle. Many centuries later, fears of invasion in the Napoleonic and two world wars also focussed on the long, flat coastline of eastern England. East Anglia’s defences were largely untested in modern times, but the Britons left to defend themselves by the departing Roman army in 410 were not so fortunate. We do not know if the Britons made any attempt to garrison or protect the forts of the Saxon shore; but whether they defended themselves or not, in the fifth century the Romanised descendants of Boudicca’s Iceni tribe faced the vanguard of a swathe of invading barbarian peoples who would one day give their name to a nation: Angelcynn, the Angles.

The coming of the Angles

The Angles’ homeland lay far to the east, beyond the country of the Saxones. Angeln is a small protuberance on the ‘neck’ of Denmark facing the cold waters of the Baltic Sea, today located in the far north of Germany. The territory is flat, arable and cut in two by the wide estuary of the River Schlei. In fact, although it is only a fraction of the size of East Anglia, Angeln has a great deal in common with the land to which it gave its name. It is easy to see why the adventurous farmers of Angeln were attracted to this part of Britain. Not only was it the first land they would have encountered on crossing the North Sea, but its navigable estuarine rivers were also perfect for their fast, clinker-built ships. In 1939 the ghostly imprint of one such ship was photographed under a burial mound at Sutton Hoo before it crumbled back into the sandy soil.3 The 51-foot-long larchwood ship discovered at Ashby Dell near the Yare estuary in 1830 (and long since lost) may have been even older – perhaps one of the very ships that brought the first Angles.4

We do not know exactly when the Angles came. Judging from archaeological finds, some Germanic people were already living in East Anglia very shortly after the Roman legions left in 410 (or even before – the late Roman Empire often used barbarian mercenaries).5 Medieval chroniclers, always eager to assign every event to a definite date, settled on 527 for the Anglian conquest of East Anglia, but the archaeological evidence suggests a much earlier and more gradual settlement in the middle decades of the fifth century.6 Settlement began along the estuaries of south Suffolk and spread inland along the region’s navigable rivers. Although the name of one people group – the Angles – would give the region its name, settlers from western Norway may also have been present, judging from the survival of artefacts such as a late fifth-century Norwegian bracteate (a large flat brooch imitating the design of a Roman coin) excavated at Lakenheath in Suffolk.7 Bearing the runic legend mægæ medu (perhaps ‘mead for kinsmen’) and the apparent battle cry gægogæ, the Undley bracteate conjures up an era of roving barbarian war bands far removed from the Roman imagery it mimicked.8

The old idea, largely derived from the writings of the Dark Age authors Gildas and Bede, that the native Britons packed up and fled westwards has been discredited by the most recent genetic evidence.9 The genomes of modern East Anglians show that they are largely descended from native Britons who stayed and presumably became culturally and linguistically ‘anglicised’. Furthermore, the archaeological record yields no evidence of massacres of Britons or of a mass migration out of East Anglia. Germanic-style grave goods and cremation burials in earthenware urns appear to have replaced the inhumation burials of the Britons in the second half of the fifth century.10 A collection of these early cremation burials unearthed at Walsingham in Norfolk was the subject of England’s earliest ever ‘archaeological report’, Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia or Urne-Buriall (1658) – although Browne mistakenly identified the urns as Roman, and his book is better known for its eloquence than for its accuracy.11

Even in this most ‘English’ of all regions the occasional reminder of the Britons still lingered, in place names such as Walpole (‘pool of the Britons’) and Walton (‘homestead of the Britons’), and in personal names such as Ovinus (Owini), the seventh-century ‘steward’ of Æthelthryth of Ely.12 Romano-British bracelets have been found at early Anglian burial sites in Cambridgeshire and Suffolk as children’s anklets, although it is unclear whether this was simply a matter of reuse or an indication that these populations clung in some way to British culture.13 Yet the Angles seem to have absorbed the indigenous people into their society at an early date rather than segregating, enslaving or expelling them. The new Angle-land may have been a bridgehead for the Angles’ expansion into other parts of Britain – westward into the Fens and east midlands, and northward into Lincolnshire, Humberside, Northumbria and even Lothian (in modern Scotland). Yet since archaeology, genetics and place names are our sole sources of information about an illiterate pagan culture, our understanding of this shadowy period of the fifth and sixth centuries is inevitably very limited.

Place name evidence from Norfolk and Suffolk suggests a chaotic situation in early East Anglia, with different war bands led by Anglian warriors competing for influence over the land and the native population. There was certainly no centrally organised or personally led invasion. The suffix ‘–ing’ found in such place names as Ashbocking, Exning, Blything (the name of a hundred) and Gipping (the name of a river) referred originally to people groups or followers of a particular leader. Thus the River Gipping is probably named after the Gyppingas, either an Anglian clan name or the followers of a person called Gyppe.14 Just like the English-speaking settlers of the American West in the nineteenth century, the earliest English settlers of Britain loved to name new settlements after themselves and their families.

Whatever the original pattern of the Anglian settlement, by the beginning of the seventh century a single dynasty dominated the East Angles – by dint of violence, ingenuity or a combination of both – and one leader had gained recognition as cyning (‘guardian of the kin’). That dynasty was the Wuffingas or Wuffings. According to a genealogy of the eighth-century East Anglian king Ælfwald (d.749), the Wuffings were (in common with all Anglian royal houses) descended from the pagan god Woden. Uniquely, however, the Wuffings also claimed descent from ‘Caser’ (Caesar), a claim to association with the Roman Empire that will be considered later in this chapter. Wehha was supposedly the first of his line to have ruled in Britain, but it was his son Wuffa (‘little wolf’) who gave his name to the dynasty.15 The Wuffings’ centre of power was the Deben Valley in south-east Suffolk, around Woodbridge and Rendlesham, and it may have been from this area that they launched their bid to unite the East Angles into one kingdom in the 570s, when a site on the banks of the Deben estuary, Sutton Hoo, became the burial ground for their warrior elite.16

From Britain to England

East Anglia – Estengle in Old English – was the only Anglo-Saxon kingdom whose name referenced the Angles. By contrast, several kingdoms (Wessex, Sussex, Essex and Middlesex) were named after the Saxons. It is curious, therefore, that the nation that eventually emerged from this jumble of kingdoms in the tenth century was called ‘England’ (and not ‘Saxony’, for example). It is likely that the early Anglo-Saxons called the island they lived on Bryten, ‘Britain’, but no Old English-speaking inhabitant of pre-Conquest England would have described him- or herself as British (a term applied exclusively to the indigenous walas who would eventually become the Welsh and Cornish). Nor would he or she have used the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’, a composite term coined by Continental writers in the eighth century to distinguish the Germanic people living in Britain from the Continental Saxons. In the ninth century, King Alfred the Great described himself as ‘king of the An...

Table of contents

• Preface
• List of Illustrations
• Abbreviations
• Chronology
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 • Angelcynn
• Chapter 2 • Death of a King
• Chapter 3 • Invincible Martyr
• Chapter 4 • ‘Patron of all England’
• Chapter 5 • A Lost King
• Conclusion • Finding Edmund?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Plates