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East Anglia is a region of eastern England. It has no official status, and the boundaries of East Anglia are undefined. It includes the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk as well as part of the counties of Essex and Cambridgeshire, although definitions usually include the latter in its entirety. A few definitions may also incorporate the whole of Essex or a small part of southern Lincolnshire bordering The Wash. Some of the area is characterised by its flatness, consisting of fenland and reclaimed marshland, though much of Suffolk comprises gently rolling hills. East Anglia forms the core of the East of England region.
Arable farming and horticulture have proven very successful in this fertile country. The landscape has been heavily influenced by Dutch technology, from the influx of clay pantiles to the draining of the fens. It has a wide range of small-scale holiday destinations ranging from traditional coastal resorts, through historic towns such as Bury St Edmunds, Cambridge and Ely to the modern holiday villas of Center Parcs (plaza destroyed by fire on April 4 2002, completely refurbished and re-opened to the public on July 11 2003) set in Thetford Forest. The military constructed many airfields during World War II and a few of these remain in use. One, near Norwich, has become a civilian airfield to serve the city.
The Norfolk Broads, now part of The Broads National Park, form a network of waterways between Norwich and the coast and are popular for recreational boating.
The University of East Anglia lies a few miles west of Norwich.
History
The Kingdom of the East Angles, formed about the year 520 by the merging of the North and the South Folk, was one of the seven traditional kingdoms of the so-called Anglo-Saxon heptarchy. For a brief period following a victory over the rival kingdom of Northumbria around the year 616, East Anglia was the most powerful of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England, and its king Raedwald was Bretwalda. But this did not last: over the next forty years, East Anglia was defeated by the Mercians three times, and it continued to weaken relative to the other kingdoms until in 794, Offa of Mercia had its king Aethelbert killed and took control of the kingdom himself.
The independence of the East Anglians was restored by a successful rebellion against Mercia (825 - 827), in course of which two Mercian kings were killed attempting to crush it. On November 20, 870 the Danes killed King Edmund and took the Kingdom, which they named East Anglia (see Ivar the Boneless). The Saxons retook the area in 920, only to lose it again in 1015-1017, when it was conquered by Canute the Great and given as a fiefdom in 1017 to Thorkel the High.
See also: Kings of East Anglia
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