ABSTRACT
That the institutions of medieval East Anglia differed sharply from those of Wessex and Mercia has long been recognized. It has been the fashion to account for these differences by the settlement in East Anglia in 879 of the Danes in Guthrum’s army. Recently R. H. C. Davis has shown that the settlement cannot have been thick enough to justify the assumption that East Anglia was reorganized along Danish lines. 1 Except in the Norfolk Broadland, Danish place-names are not common, certainly not nearly as common as in the northern Danelaw. There are by no means as many Danish personal names in the early records as Anglo-Saxon ones. It is hard to demonstrate much Danish settlement in Suffolk, and yet the institutions of Suffolk are identical with those of Norfolk. Above all, the social organization of East Anglia does not much resemble that of the northern Danelaw, where we know that large numbers of Danes settled, but does resemble that of Kent. Davis concludes that the peculiarities of East Anglian society must be traced back to a time before the Danish invasion. He does not try to answer the questions: Traced to what? To whom? The present paper offers answers. It will argue that the social organization of medieval East Anglia displays such close similarities with that of medieval Friesland that people of Frisian origin, or at least closely related to the Frisians in culture, must have invaded East Anglia in the fifth century.
