CONTEXT 175 : MARCH 2023 11 THE EAST ANGLIAN COAST Opposite: East Anglia and the places discussed in articles in this issue (Map: Rob Cowan) Editorial Where East Anglia meets the North Sea East Anglia has always had a strange relationship with the sea. Locals tell the story of the Wild Man of Orford: a naked, hairy man-like creature that fishermen found in their nets off the Suffolk coast. Taken to Orford Castle, it was questioned, only grunted in reply, and was fed with raw fish. The Wild Man was kept at the castle for a while and taken for supervised swims in the sea, until one day it swam off and was never seen again. Such stories, like the tales of hearing church bells from the sunken town of Dunwich, live on in the minds of dwellers on this coast. Everyone recognises East Anglia as that bulge on the east of England, with Lowestoft as the UK’s most easterly settlement. Depending on who is defining it, East Anglia comprises the historic counties of Norfolk and Suffolk and, possibly, Cambridgeshire and Essex. Norfolk and Suffolk, the old Kingdom of East Anglia, used to be the North Folk and the South Folk. Those hostile folk had sailed over from what is now northern Germany to fill the vacuum after the Romans had left. At least, that is what we were taught at school. The noted historian Susan Ooshuizen has cast doubt on that Anglo-Saxon origin story in her 2019 book The Emergence of the English. She finds no reliable evidence for anything amounting to invasion, settlement or conquest of Britain from north-west Europe in the 5th century. Instead, she suggests, after the Romans left there was sufficient social, economic and political stability to allow Roman administrative and military structures to continue to evolve and adapt for at least two centuries. By analogy, Ooshuizen asks us to imagine what archaeologists of the future might deduce from, for example, the remains of IKEA stores in England. ‘Let us imagine that in (say) two thousand years’ time all documentary evidence from the 21st century had disappeared and that only archaeological evidence for the stores survived, together with distributions of their goods that diminished in volume with distance from the store,’ she writes. ‘Archaeologists… might interpret the evidence as that of the colonisation of Britain by Sweden during the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and the stores as central places designed to state and preserve the immigrants’ Swedish identity. We, however, know that the distribution of the stores is evidence of trade rather than colonisation, and that the distribution of their goods reflects the popularity of Swedish design in British homes. There is no link to Swedish ethnicity in Britain.’ Influence rather than invasion, then. It seems that the story of East Anglia is one of continuity: the continuous development of its people, who have long kept a wary eye on the continuous erosion of much of its coast. In this issue of Context we find what happens today at some of those East Anglian places where land meets sea.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgyMjA=