Redwald Sutton Hoo Helmet

Miniature Sutton Hoo Helmet Redwald, King of East AngliaRedwald was the king of East Anglia from before 616 until his death in about 625AD. According to Bede, from 616 (the date of the death of elberht of Kent) he was the fourth English ruler to exercise overlordship over all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms south of the Humber, or to use the Old English word, he was the fourth Bretwalda. In 616 he defeated and killed Ethelfrith of Northumbria and thereby assisted Edwin, whom he had sheltered as an exile, to become the Northumbrian King. Redwald had been converted to Christianity, apparently at the court of elberht of Kent, but on his return to East Anglia had been led away from the faith 'by his wife and certain evil teachers.' Bede tells us that in his temple at Rendlesham he set up a Christian altar alongside a pagan one! For him it seems, Christianity meant the acceptance of an additional god, not the abandonment of his ancestral heathen ones, a not uncommon phenomenon in barbarian 'conversions' of the early Middle Ages. It is likely, though not certain, that it was Redwald who was interred in the magnificent ship-burial at Sutton Hoo, discovered in 1939.