Tag Archives: East Anglia

The East Anglians

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’.

 

 

 

 

On the Identity of England and East Anglia

Pre-Celts and Celts in the British Isles and Ireland

Like the rest of Western Europe, the British Isles and, from there, Ireland, have been inhabited for thousands of years. Originally, this population spread here from Asia. Possibly, the only representatives of this population in Europe today are the Basques. Some call the original people here ‘Ancient Britons’. This is wrong, as they were pre-Celts and ‘Briton’ is a Celtic name. In fact, we know little about them, though they built Stonehenge and their DNA still exists among the modern inhabitants of these isles. After them came new settlers from Western Europe, who had also ultimately come from Western Asia. These were the Celts (pronounced Kelts) and they left their name all over Europe and West Asia, from Galatia (now in Turkiye), Galicia (now in the Ukraine and Portugal), Vlachia, Wallachia, Gaul, Calais, Wallonia, Wales, Caledonia, Galloway and Galway.

They also left the name of their language, Gaelic and Welsh, or in France, Gallo.  Many Celts had settled in these isles only a few centuries before the Romans arrived in the first century AD. For the Celts too were ‘invaders’. When the Roman Army conquered what came to be called England and Wales, famously building walls to separate themselves from the Celts in what is now Scotland and not occupying but only visiting Ireland, it took control of what it called ‘Britain’. Although their numerical presence was tiny, like the British elite in India in the 19th century, the Roman elite exercised total control and exploitation and had an enormous influence on national infrastructure and later history. Indeed, the word ‘Britain’ was later used by, and the Roman project imitated by, Normans, Stuarts, Georgians and Victorians alike for their own imperialist projects.

The Coming of the English

In the third century AD, if not even earlier, the Romans in Britain began to recruit Germanic soldiers, above all from the Saxons. They settled especially on the eastern and southern coast of what is now England and manned the nine Roman fortresses there, on what came to be known ‘The Saxon Shore’. Local Celtic women called these foreign Saxon mercenaries ‘Sassenachs’ and intermarried with them. After the Roman presence grew ever weaker in the fourth century and then ceased with their withdrawal from Britain in 410, the Saxons were in the fifth and sixth centuries gradually absorbed by new and kindred Germanic settlers, notably Jutes, Frisians and above all Angles. The Angles settled all over the eastern half of what became England, from the north down as far as Essex, and into the interior in ‘the Midlands’. The Saxons remained in the south, in Essex, Sussex and Wessex. However, the other Germanic tribes were outnumbered and absorbed by the Angles, so the country came to be called ‘Angle-kin’ (that is, those who are related to the Angles), or ‘Angleland’, which became England.

The ‘Englisc’ (pronounced ENG-lish, unlike the modern French pronunciation of English as ‘ING-lish’) were so predominant that they imposed their language over the area which they had settled, whereas the Romans had utterly failed to impose Latin on the Celts. After the English, came Vikings. These were Danes and Norwegians, who settled mainly on the coasts of eastern England from the present Scottish border down through Newcastle, Yorkshire (the Geordie and Yorkshire dialects and accents are fundamentally Viking) and Lincolnshire to Norfolk and north-east Suffolk. Although the Vikings considerably modified and simplified the English language, they too were absorbed and their DNA accounts for only 6% of modern DNA in England. As for the Normans (French Vikings) who occupied England from 1066 on, their DNA is almost invisible except among the aristocracy. It may perhaps be only 0.1%. However, as the near-millennial Establishment, their cultural and linguistic influence is still felt today.

East to West: Angles and Celts

The English then settled densely only the eastern half of what we now call England. The further east the greater the English DNA, the further west the greater the Celtic DNA and the greater the Celtic population and influence. England itself is then divided between a mainly English eastern half and a mainly Celtic western half. Thus, the British Isles and Ireland are genetically an Anglo-Celtic community. Just as in France, one can see the distribution of DNA by what people drink – the Germanic north near Belgium drinks beer, the Celtic north-west drinks cider, but the vast bulk of Latinised France drinks wine – so in England to this day also.

For example, in East Anglia people refer to ale, in the East Midlands which begins after the Rivers Ouse and Cam in eastern Cambridgeshire and ends near Newark in eastern Nottinghamshire, they refer to beer, and in the West Midlands, west of Newark and ending on the Welsh border, they refer to cider. Beyond this of course, we arrive in what used to be purely Celtic areas, Cymru (pronounced ‘Kumri’, called ‘Wales’), Cornwall (the ‘Welsh’ who live in the ‘corn’ or ‘horn’), Cumbria, the Isle of Man, Scotland and Ireland. Here the Celtic languages are still today, if only among a minority, alive. English was not spoken there until recent centuries.

East Anglia and Its Character

East Anglia is the furthest east you can go in England (the actual most easterly point is Lowestoft) and therefore, racially, the most English. This is also the closest to the Netherlands, whose Dutch and Frisian languages are linguistically the closest to English. Geographically, East Anglia consists of Norfolk, Suffolk, eastern Cambridgeshire as far as the eastern bank of the River Ouse, including Ely, and of the River Cam, and of a strip of North Essex near the Suffolk border some seven or so miles deep. The extent of the East Anglian domain could once be determined by the dialects of Norfolk and Suffolk, lapping over to eastern Cambridgeshire and North Essex, though these are less and less heard today. Where East Anglia ended in eastern Cambridgeshire, there began the East Mercian (East Midlands) accent and where East Anglian ended in North Essex there began the Essex accent, which is the same as the east London accent. What can we say of East Anglians, who are always so underestimated by foreigners, newcomers and upstarts, who understand little of our history and reality?

The East Anglian character is outwardly modest and hidden, but inwardly we are sturdy, rugged and reliable. You do not mess with us, unless you are a foreign fool and you will always come off worse. We are also bluff, that is, good-naturedly frank, and our humour is very dry and wry. Here there is a similarity to our neighbours, the Dutch. Prone to invasions from Continental Europe just across the shared lake of the North Sea, we are suspicious and sceptical of others and always test them to see what they are made of. It is make or break time for them. We are practical and pragmatic, always concrete. However, there also exists among us a romantic lyricism. This can be seen by the fact that although the greatest English music in inspired in the west of England, the greatest English art is made in East Anglia. This is illustrated by the works of Gainsborough (1727-1788), Crome (1768-1821), Constable (1776-1837), Cotman (1782-1842), Munnings (1878-1959) and Seago (1910-1974). The huge skies, the rolling landscape and, above all, the characteristic light of East Anglia have here been fundamental.