SA0230 Sutton Hoo Helmet Redwald, King of East Anglia

Sutton Hoo Helmet Redwald, King of East Anglia
Redwald 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 Æðelberht 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
Æðelberht 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 AgesIt is likely, though not certain, that it was
Redwald who was interred in the magnificent ship-burial at Sutton Hoo,
discovered in 1939.