Like the majority of English people, the East Anglians are chiefly descended from the Angles, who once lived on the Angeln Peninsula in the present northern tip of Germany, just below the south-eastern corner of Denmark. They began settling here with some of their neighbours, Saxons, Frisians and others, already at the end of the third century. Some intermarried locally, but in the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries their wider families joined them. By about 600 the Angles dominated the whole region and indeed the whole country, giving their name to England, for they were the majority of the new settlers. Thus, they gave their name to this part of Eastern England, which bulges out into the North Sea, once called the German Ocean. This is in fact more a relatively shallow lake than a sea, with a clockwise current that separates Eastern England from the coast of the Netherlands and Belgium, some 200 miles away.

The River Waveney divides the East Anglian folk into two regions, north and south, which became Norfolk and Suffolk, although these used to extend into the eastern half of what came to be called Cambridgeshire, beyond which lived the Angles of Mercia, now the East and West Midlands (1). In the early sixth century the East Angles formed their own Kingdom of East Anglia. In the ninth century they were joined by numbers of Danish invaders, especially on the coasts and along the rivers. Living in this relatively isolated region and facing an often hostile Continent, over time East Anglians came to display suspicion, aloofness, independence and individuality and were reputed as modest, hard-working, brave, reliable and frugal in their attitudes. Living near the sea, like that famous East Anglian, Lord Nelson, they also displayed a spirit of adventure, inquisitiveness, love of freedom and fair dealing.

Despots have learned about this East Anglian love of freedom to their sorrow. Such despots include the first Norman invader in St Audrey’s Ely, where he was resisted by Hereward. Then new resistance appeared on St Edmund’s Day in 1214 at Bury St Edmunds, which became not only ‘the shrine of the king’, but also ‘the cradle of the law’. For St Edmund, King and Martyr (+ 869), is our East Anglian champion. Then there came the examples of independence given in Norfolk by Geoffrey Lister and Robert Kett in their rebellion against injustice of the fourteenth century, those who rose up against tyranny under the early Cromwell (before he became a tyrant), and later against the European tyrants Napoleon and Hitler. All the foreign tyrants, and to this day, have always been confused by the old East Anglian subtlety of feigned simplicity and apparent ignorance, and the reluctance to show what is in fact deeply-felt emotion.

This feigned ignorance. ‘playing dumb’, is only a sign of our modesty. East Anglians have never liked know-it-all boastfulness, American-style flamboyance and alien pomposity. We prefer the culture of our own modest simplicity, which is so disrespected by some. Partly for this reason, East Anglia is the home of English Painting, with its soft, homelike scenes and our native, pastel-shaded woods and fields. This School was led by such as the famed Gainsborough, Constable, Crome, Cotman, three generations of the Norwich School, and in the last century the great Sir Alfred Munnings. All were inspired by the broad skies, cloudscapes, seascapes and landscapes of the East Anglian scene. East Anglia is our home and in our international age of constant change and instability, all the more an anchor to which we hold. Let London and other big cities go their way. We are here, we are staying here and we are defending here.

Note 1:

With the River Waveney flowing through its middle, the North Sea to the north and the east, the East Anglian border with Essex to the south formed by the River Stour, and to the west by the Rivers Ouse and Cam, East Anglia was distinct from the rest of the country, almost an island. Beyond the Ouse and the Cam, as far as a line descending from Newark, stretches the East Midlands, thereafter it is the West Midlands as far as the Welsh border. Traditionally, East Anglians drank ale, in the East Midlands beer, and in the West Midlands they drank cider.

To the north of East Anglia, in what is now called Lincolnshire and in Northumbria, lived more Angles. Like the Jutes in Kent, southern Hampshire and on the Isle of Wight, the Saxons lived in the south of England, in Essex (East Saxons), Middlesex (Middle Saxons), Sussex (South Saxons) and Wessex (West Saxons). There are no North Saxons, only Anglians, so numerous that they gave their name to the whole country. The term ‘Anglo-Saxon’, is historical nonsense. Indeed, today it is used to mean ‘Anglo-American’, or rather ‘Modern Norman’.