Anna of East Anglia
Anna | |
---|---|
Battle of Bulcamp | |
Burial | probably Blythburgh, Suffolk, now lost |
Consort | Sæwara |
Issue | Jurmin Seaxburh Æthelthryth Æthelburh possibly Wihtburh |
House | Wuffingas |
Father | Eni |
Religion | Christian |
Anna (or Onna; killed 653 or 654) was
Little is known of Anna's life or his reign, as few records have survived from this period. In 631 he may have been at Exning, close to the Devil's Dyke. In 645 Cenwalh of Wessex was driven from his kingdom by Penda and, due to Anna's influence, he was converted to Christianity while living as an exile at the East Anglian court. Upon his return from exile, Cenwalh re-established Christianity in his own kingdom and the people of Wessex then remained firmly Christian.
Around 651 the land around
Sources
The kingdom of East Anglia (
In contrast to the kingdoms of
Early life and marriage
Anna was the son of Eni, a member of the ruling Wuffingas family, and nephew of
Anna was married; Bede refers to the saint Sæthryth as "daughter of the wife of Anna, king of the East Angles".[6] In Abbott Folcard's Life of St Botolph, written in the 11th century, Botolph is described as having been at one time the chaplain to the sisters of a king, Æthelmund, whose mother was named Sæwara. Folcard names two of Sæwara's kinsmen as Æthelhere and Æthelwold. Since these are the names of two of Anna's brothers, Steven Plunkett suggests that it is "tempting" to consider that Sæwara was married to Anna, and that Æthelmund might either be Anna's full name, or the name of an otherwise unknown East Anglian sub-king.[7]
The Liber Eliensis, on the other hand, names Hereswith, the sister of Hild, abbess of Whitby, as Anna's wife and the mother of Sæthryth, Seaxburh of Ely and Æthelthryth.[8] However, the Liber Eliensis is regarded with caution by historians: Rosalind Love says that the mediaeval writers who interpreted Bede's information about Hereswith made an "erroneous assumption" regarding her connection with Anna and his family.[4][9] Bede is clear that Hereswith had left East Anglia as a widow before Hild visited the kingdom, at which time Anna was very much alive. Historians now believe that Hereswith was Anna's sister-in-law, and some have thought that around the time that she married into the East Anglian royal family, Anna had already been king for a decade.[10]
In 631 Anna was probably at the Suffolk village of Exning, an important settlement with royal connections,[11] and, according to the Liber Eliensis, the birthplace of his daughter Æthelthryth.[12] By tradition, Æthelthryth is said to have been baptised at Exning in a pool known as St Mindred's Well.[13] Exning was an important place strategically, as it stood just on the East Anglian side of the Devil's Dyke, a major earthwork stretching between the Fen edge and the headwaters of the River Stour, built at an earlier date to defend the East Anglian region from attack. An early Anglo-Saxon cemetery discovered there suggests the existence of an important site nearby, possibly a royal estate or regio.[14]
King of the East Angles
Accession and rule
During 632 or 633
Anna arranged an important diplomatic marriage between his daughter Seaxburh and
D. P. Kirby uses the presence of East Anglian princesses living under the veil in Gaul as evidence of the Frankish orientation of Anna's kingdom at this time, continued since the reign of his predecessor Rædwald.[31] The Wuffingas dynasty may have been connected with monastic foundations in the area around Faramoutiers through Anna's predecessor Sigeberht, who had spent several years as an exile in Gaul and had become a devout and learned Christian due to his experiences of monastic life.[32]
In 641
Anna's hold on the western limits of his kingdom, which bordered on the Fen lands that surrounded the Isle of Ely, was strengthened by the marriage in 651 (or slightly later) of his daughter Æthelthryth to Tondberht, a prince of the South Gyrwe, a people living in the fens who may have been settled in the area around Ely.[21][note 3] Æthelthryth, accompanied by her minister Owine, travelled from Ely to Northumbria when she married for the second time, to Ecgfrith.[38]
Exile
During his reign Anna endowed the monastery at Cnobheresburg with rich buildings and objects.[39] The monastery was built in about 633 by Fursey after he arrived in East Anglia. In time, weary of attacks on the kingdom, Fursey left East Anglia for good, leaving the monastery to his brother Foillan.[17] When in 651 Penda attacked the monastery, Anna and his men arrived and held the Mercians back. This gave Foillan and his monks enough time to escape with their books and valuables, but Penda defeated Anna and drove him into exile, possibly to the kingdom of Merewalh of the Magonsætan, in western Shropshire.[40] He returned to East Anglia in about 654.[41]
Death, burial place and successors
Soon after 653, when Penda made his son Peada the ruler of the Middle Angles (but still continued to rule his own country),[42] the Mercian assault on East Anglia was repeated. The opposing armies of Penda and Anna met at Bulcamp, near Blythburgh in Suffolk. The East Anglians were defeated and many were slain, including King Anna and his son Jurmin.[17] Anna's death is mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in the entry for 653 or 654, "Her Anna cining werð ofslagen ..." – 'Here Anna was killed' – but no other details of the battle in which he died are given.[43][note 4]
Blythburgh, a mile from Bulcamp and situated near the fordable headwaters of the Blyth estuary, was afterwards believed to be the location of the tombs of Anna and Jurmin.[4][38] It is a candidate for a monastic site or a royal regio (estate). According to Peter Warner, the Latin derivation of part of the nearby place-name 'Bulcamp' indicates its ancient origins, and mediaeval sources which claim continuous Christian worship at Blythburgh throughout the Anglo-Saxon period provide circumstantial evidence of its connections with East Anglian royalty and Christianity.[45] Part of an 8th-century whalebone diptych or writing-tablet, used for liturgical purposes, has been found near the site.[46]
Saint Botolph began to build his monastery at Icanho, now conclusively identified as
Bede praised Anna's piety in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People,[51] and modern historians have since regarded Anna as a devout king,[52] but his reputation as a devoted Christian is mainly because he produced a son and four daughters who were all made into Anglo-Saxon saints.[53] Five hundred years after his death, his tomb at Blythburgh was (according to the Liber Eliensis) still "venerated by the pious devotion of faithful people".[54]
Family
Anna's children were all canonised. The eldest, Seaxburh, was the wife of Eorcenberht of Kent. She ruled Kent from 664 until her son Ecgberht came of age. Æthelthryth, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, founded the monastery at Ely in 673. Another daughter, Æthelburh, spent her life at the nunnery of Faremoutiers. Anna's son, Jurmin, was of warrior age in 653 when he was killed in battle.
By tradition, Anna is said to have had a fourth daughter, Wihtburh, an abbess at Dereham (or possibly West Dereham), where there was a royal double monastery.[55] She may never have existed: Bede fails to mention her and she first appears in a calendar in the late 10th century Bosworth Psalter.[56] She may have been a character specifically created by the religious community at Ely, where her remains were supposed to have been taken after being stolen from Dereham[38][57] and subsequently used as visual proof of the incorruptibility of a saint's body, a substitute for her sister Æthelthryth, whose body had to remain unexamined in her tomb.[58] Manuscript F of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which dates from about 1100, mentions Wihtburh's death when it records that her body was found uncorrupted in 798, 55 years after she died. The resulting date for her death of 743 is far too late for her to have been a sister of Æthelthryth, who was born in 636.[59][60]
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Notes
- ^ Bede gives the story without dates, but makes it clear that Anna was king when Cenwalh came to East Anglia; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle gives the date as 645 or 646 but does not specify that Anna was king at the time.[22][23]
- ^ A Christian king like Anna would have made a priority of demonstrating his commitment to his kingdom's new faith by acting in a way that would mark them out as holy, and the patronage of nunneries would have been of concern to him.[29] It is not recorded why Anna's daughters took the veil. Yorke comments on the paucity of written documents regarding the princesses of East Anglia, considering the important role they played in the foundation of Anglo-Saxon royal nunneries.[30]
- ^ A map of southern England in the 8th century (drawn by Reginald Piggott) gives an indication of where the Gyrwe people lived – between East Anglia and the land of the Middle Angles.[37]
- ^ Manuscript A of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle dates Onna's death at 654; Anna's demise is dated by Manuscript E at 653. See Swanton, Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, pp. xv–xvi for a discussion of some of the discrepancies between the different manuscripts and possible reasons for these.[44]
Footnotes
- ^ public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "East Anglia". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the
- ^ Yorke, Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon England, p. 58.
- ^ Fairweather, Liber Eliensis, pp. 8–10.
- ^ a b c d e Kelly, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: Anna (d. 654?), king of the East Angles.
- ^ Lapidge, Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England, p. 154.
- ^ Bede, (edition by Colgrave and Mynors), Ecclesiastical History of the English People, (Book III, Chapter 8), pp. 238–9, "... inter quas erat Saethryd, filia uxoris Annae regis Orientalium Anglorum".
- ^ Plunkett, Suffolk in Anglo-Saxon Times, pp. 116–17.
- ^ Fairweather, Liber Eliensis: A History of the Isle of Ely from the Seventh Century to the Twelfth, compiled by a Monk of Ely in the Twelfth Century, pp. 14–15.
- ^ Love, Goscelin of Saint-Bertin: the Hagiography of the Female Saints of Ely, p. lxxxviii.
- ^ Hunter Blair, in Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England, p. 6.
- ^ Warner, The Origins of Suffolk, p. 119.
- ^ Fairweather, Liber Eliensis: A History of the Isle of Ely from the Seventh Century to the Twelfth, compiled by a Monk of Ely in the Twelfth Century, pp. 15–16.
- ^ James, Suffolk and Norfolk, p. 14.
- ^ Warner, The Origins of Suffolk, pp. 119–20.
- ^ Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, pp. 80–81.
- ^ Yorke, Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon England, p. 62.
- ^ a b c Warner, The Origins of Suffolk, pp. 110–13.
- ^ Kirby, The Earliest English Kings, pp. 207–8.
- ^ Kirby, The Earliest English Kings, p. 75.
- ^ Kirby, The Earliest English Kings, p. 208 (note 26).
- ^ a b Yorke, Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon England, pp. 63, 65.
- ^ Bede (ed. Colgrave and Mynors), Ecclesiastical History of the English People, (Book III, Chapter 7), p. 235.
- ^ Swanton, Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, pp. 28–29.
- ^ Kirby, The Earliest English Kings, p. 79.
- ^ Yorke, Kings and Kingdoms of early Anglo-Saxon-England, pp. 62–3.
- ^ Dumville, Essex, Middle Anglia, and the Expansion of Mercia in the South-East Midlands, p. 132.
- ^ a b Yorke, Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon England, pp. 65–66.
- ^ Kirby, The Earliest English Kings, p. 36.
- ^ Yorke, Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses, pp. 17, 30.
- ^ Yorke, Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses, pp. 18, 27.
- ^ Kirby, The Earliest English Kings, pp. 55, 74.
- ^ Yorke, Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses, p. 24.
- ^ Yorke, Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon England, p. 78.
- ^ Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, p. 67.
- ^ Swanton, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, p. 26.
- ^ Plunkett, Suffolk in Anglo-Saxon Times, p. 110.
- ^ University of Cambridge (Department of ASNC), online map: Southern England in the Eighth Century.
- ^ a b c d Yorke, Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon England, pp. 70–71.
- ^ Yorke, Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon England, pp. 62–63, 70.
- ^ Yorke, Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon England, pp. 62–63.
- ^ West, et al., Iken, St Botolph, and the Coming of East Anglian Christianity, p. 45.
- ^ According to Bede (Yorke, Kings and Kingdoms, p. 63).
- ^ Earle, Two of the Saxon Chronicles Parallel, p. 27.
- ^ Earle, Two of the Saxon Chronicles Parallel, pp. 27–28.
- ^ Warner, The Origins of Suffolk, pp. 115, 120.
- ^ Wessex Archaeology.
- ^ Blair, Oxford Dictionary of Nationary Biography: Botwulf (fl. 654 – c. 670), abbot of Iken.
- ^ Yorke, Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon England, p. 69.
- ^ Kirby, The Earliest English Kings, pp. 40, 89.
- ^ Yorke, Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon England, pp. 68, 69.
- ^ Bede, (edition by Colgrave and Mynors), Ecclesiastical History of the English People, (Book IV, Chapter 19), p. 391.
- ^ See for example Fox and Dickens, The early cultures of north-west Europe: (H. M. Chadwick memorial studies), p. 111.
- ^ Hollis, Anglo-Saxon Women and the Church, p. 68.
- ^ Fairweather, Liber Eliensis: A History of the Isle of Ely from the Seventh Century to the Twelfth, compiled by a Monk of Ely in the Twelfth Century, p. 21.
- ^ Yorke, Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses, p. 17.
- ^ Bishop and Gaquet, The Bosworth Psalter, p. 96.
- ^ Fryde, et al., Handbook of British Chronology, p. 8.
- ^ Raguin and Stanbury, Women's Space: Patronage, Place, and Gender in the Medieval Church, p. 49.
- ^ Swanton, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, pp. xxvii–xxviii, 56.
- ^ Yorke, Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses, p. 37 (note 11).
References
Primary sources
- ISBN 9-780-19822-202-6.
- Clarendon Press.
- Gaskett, G. A.; Bishop, Edmund (1908). The Bosworth Psalter. London: George Bell and Sons.
- Fairweather, Janet (trans.), ed. (2005). Liber Eliensis: A History of the Isle of Ely from the Seventh Century to the Twelfth, compiled by a Monk of Ely in the Twelfth Century. Woodbridge: Boydell. ISBN 978-1-84383-015-3.
- Swanton, Michael (1997). The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-92129-9.
Secondary sources
- Bishop, Edmund; Gasquet, F. A. (1908). The Bosworth Psalter. London: George Bell & Sons.
- Blair, John (September 2004). "Botwulf (fl. 654 – c. 670), abbot of Iken". In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 10. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- ISBN 978-0-7185-1317-7.
- Fox, Sir Cyril; Dickens, Bruce (1950). The Early Cultures of North-West Europe: (H. M. Chadwick memorial studies). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Fryde, E. B.; Greenway, D. E.; Porter, S.; Roy, I. (1986). Handbook of British Chronology (3rd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 216. ISBN 978-0-521-56350-5.
- ISBN 978-0-8014-0770-3.
- Hollis, Stephanie (1992). Anglo-Saxon Women and the Church. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press. ISBN 978-0-85115-317-9.
- Hunter Blair, Peter (2010). "Whitby as a centre of learning in the seventh century". In Lapidge, Michael; Gneuss, Helmut (eds.). Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England: Studies Presented to Peter Clemoes on the Occasion of his Sixty-Fifth Birthday. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-12871-1.
- ISBN 978-1-870567-10-7.
- Kelly, S. E. (September 2004). "Anna (d. 654?), king of the East Angles". In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Kirby, D. P. (2000). The Earliest English Kings. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-24211-0.
- Lapidge, Michael (2001). The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 978-0-631-22492-1.
- Love, Rosalind C. (2004). Goscelin of Saint-Bertin: the Hagiography of the Female Saints of Ely. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-820815-0.
- Matthew, Colin, ed. (2004). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Retrieved 12 March 2011.
- Plunkett, Steven (2005). Suffolk in Anglo-Saxon Times. Stroud: Tempus. ISBN 978-0-7524-3139-0.
- Raguin, Virginia Chieffo; Stanbury, Sarah, eds. (2005). Women's Space: Patronage, Place, and Gender in the Medieval Church. State University of New York. p. 49. ISBN 978-0-7914-6365-9.
- ISBN 978-0-19-821716-9.
- Warner, Peter (1996). The Origins of Suffolk. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. ISBN 978-0-7190-3817-4.
- Wessex Archaeology. "Blythburgh Priory, Blythburgh, Suffolk, Archaeological Evaluation and Assessment of Results". Retrieved 31 May 2010.
- West, S. E.; Scarfe, N.; Cramp, R. J. (1984). "Iken, St Botolph, and the Coming of East Anglian Christianity". Proc. Suffolk Institute of Archaeology. 15: 279–301. Archived from the original on 8 August 2010.
- ISBN 978-0-415-16639-3.
- ISBN 978-0-8264-6040-0.
External links
- Anna 1 at Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England
- An episode of Time Team (Series 16, Episode 13 – Skeletons in the Shed: Blythburgh, Suffolk, first broadcast on 29 March 2009), at http://www.channel4.com, in which the historical association of the village of Blythburgh with Anna is explored.
- Southern England in the Eighth Century (Map). Maps of Anglo-Saxon England. University of Cambridge (Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic). Archived from the original on 15 March 2012. Retrieved 6 June 2011.
- Information about the Blythburgh writing-tablet, now at the British Museum (in London), can be found at the museum's website.