Talk:Rædwald of East Anglia

Chronology
There seems to be some discrepancy. According to this page and Bretwalda, Raedwald lived and reigned until 627. However, List of monarchs of East Anglia says that it was 617. Is there really some question in the historical record, or is there a typo here? --Deville (Talk) 15:33, 20 February 2006 (UTC)


 * They're all wrong according to the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England under Raedwald: " ... he probably died c.624." He was certainly alive in 617 (ASC Ms. E, s.a. 617; HE, ii.12) and dead before 627 (HE, ii.14). Angus McLellan 23:00, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

Introduction
Lacks necessary information and organization. I have no further references pertaining to this subject, so I will be unable to add or subtract information in this article. Sorry! Did notice, however, that the birth/death date is disputed, and as it is very difficult to ascertain the exact birth/death date when it is this far back in history, an "(estimation)" note might be in order...? 67.182.132.87 20:38, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Recent changes
Bringing discussion here from my talk page. I've done a rewrite and had some helpful comments from User:Dr_Steven_Plunkett; I will be fixing those up on a subpage of my user page and then we can figure out what can be used from that version.

Steven, how about taking it in this order:
 * I clean up the problems you mentioned
 * We use the existing section head structure and see what material is usable from the new version, and merge section by section as we figure out what is worth adding
 * If it looks like sections can/should be split or merged, we can do that as we go.

Does that sound like a plan? If so, I'll post a note here when I've dealt with the issues you pointed out. Thanks -- Mike Christie (talk) 23:24, 30 June 2007 (UTC)

Possible changes
The draft version I've been working on is now at User:Mike Christie/Raedwald draft.

Problems identified by User:Dr Steven Plunkett are at my talk page.

I think most of those have now been addressed. Here they are, point by point, with my comments. The following notes are from Dr. Plunkett; my responses are indented below each point.
 * Sources section 'The Vikings devastated East Anglia... etc) I think this sentence could be left out as it is implied by the previous one. And also, we don't know that it was the vikings who took the books - my point (in the book) is that the absence of the books suggests that they did.
 * I removed the second reference as suggested. I actually cited this from Yorke, who says ". . . the poor survival rate [of early A-S documentation] can be linked with the events of the ninth century, when the Viking raids and settlements resulted in the disappearance (or severe impoverishment) of the major archive-holders, the two episcopal sees and the major religious houses."  Yorke cites two earlier papers for this; I don't have access to either.  I felt that my qualifications: "almost certainly" and "probably" were enough to make it clear that this is not known for certain. I do think it's worth adding something about the lack of sources and the reason for it, though it doesn't have to look like what I wrote, of course.


 * Anglian Collection - the Wuffing tally is NOT, emphatically, a Regnal List. Nothing of the sort. It is (in the case of the East Anglian list) a genealogical tally e.g. A son of B son of C. There is no guarantee that the names given are always the names of rulers, though it is taken that they are all members of one ruling house. A regnal List is a list of Kings, related or not. If it was a regnal list it would go something like Raedwald, Eorpwald, Sigebert, Ecgric, Anna, Athelhere, etc, but it doesn't, because the '-ing' means son of, and Aelfwald can't be grandson of all four brother-kings. A dynastic tally is a list of descendants. Hence Raedwald is not mentioned because Eni Tyttling was the father of Athelric, father of Ealdwulf - and not because he was or wasn't king. The list in 'Nennius' is a tally which he has mistaken for a regnal list. And as far as his comment about Wehha is concerned, you might as well say it about Wilhelm, Wehha's father, because he makes them into one person.
 * My mistake on regnal list vs. genealogical tally; I misinterpreted what I was reading. I think that's fixed in the text now.  For Wehha, I was quoting Yorke: "a note in the Historia Brittonum states that Wehha, father of Wuffa, was the first to rule."  She cites "HB, ch. 59", which is presumably a reference to an edition of "Historia Brittonum"; I don't have a source text available (I've been working from secondary sources, mostly) so I can't look at this.  Is she misreading the text?


 * Ancestry. Rather than listing it all here it should be removed from this article (apart from the briefest of summaries) and explained in the articles relevant to each of the ancestors.
 * I looked at the existing version of the article, and it's true that the existing version is very concise. I'll think about this a bit more.


 * Wuffa's reign does NOT begin in 571, he is reigning in 571, having been reigning possibly for some long time before.
 * My mistake again; didn't notice the "floruit" in the book. I've fixed this.


 * Raedwald's wife - why 'evidently a pagan'. There is no 'evidently' about it, Bede is quite clear on the matter. But what do we mean by 'a' pagan rather than just plain 'pagan'? What, really, do we mean by pagan? Not Christian, wishing to have old customs retained, reinforcing concepts of royal honour etc. I don't think Raedwald was half-hearted at all - please don't make me the authority sfor saying so!!! I think all of his actions were very deliberate, but that he was prevented from (or chose not to) implement an exclusively Christian policy at his 'home' temple. My view is that he knew exactly what he was doing.
 * Agreed. I cleaned up the reference to "evidently a pagan"; it's crystal-clear from Bede, and I've cited that.  I also agree he knew exactly what he was doing; I had put in "half-hearted" as a description of his incomplete conversion, not of his state of mind, but you're right that it gives the wrong impression.  I took it out and it is now followed directly by the possible political reasons for his behaviour.


 * 'Bishopric' at Ely - did I say that? I thought I said that Augustine was associated with a foundation (which might just be a church) at Cratendune, which is near Ely. The bishopric idea links up with something Malmesbury said about Soham and also with the wording of Liber Eliensis. If you are going to quote me (that's up to you), please notice when I have carefully NOT said certain things! otherwise I shall have to keep going through and correcting things, and frankly I haven't the time. My advice to you would be to find other authorities than me for these statements
 * You did not say "bishopric"; you said just what you thought you'd said, and I've corrected it. I don't know where I got the "bishopric" note from; I have been looking through the sources I've got access to and can't find it.  Anyway, it's corrected.


 * Thanks for all the precise footnotes, but also NB my name is Steven with a v.(!)
 * Sorry; fixed now.

All the above changes are made in the draft version. I'd be interested in any comments on those changes. The other thing I thought might be useful was to look at the first couple of sections of the existing article and see what might be usefully added.

Right now the first section is "Chronology". This covers both the sources, and the chronology that can be deduced from those sources. I would like to add a paragraph or two about the sources themselves, since many readers won't even have heard of Bede, or know that the Vikings may have destroyed early sources, or even know about the medieval chroniclers. I think this is part of giving the reader some background on how we know what we know. Do you agree that there is room for expansion here? Mike Christie (talk) 17:11, 1 July 2007 (UTC)


 * Hi Mike, I've just seen this post (6 July!). Before seeing it, I posted something of my own on the discussion page attached to your sandtray version of the article in your userspace. I'd enjoy your coments on that.

Concerning the above: B Yorke is a fine source and an excellent historian. With regard to HB (Yes, Historia Brittonum, i.e. 'Nennius'), his list is one that has been rendered in latin, so it goes from oldest to youngest, e.g. 'Woden genuit Casser genuit Titinon' etc, whereas the Anglian Collection version is in English and works the other way round, e.g. Tyttman Casering, Caser Uodning, etc. The spellings in the Nennius list suggest it has been copied with some mistakes, and from a variant form to the Anglian Collection one, but it comes down to about the same generation as the other, i.e. the Aelfwald date-horizon, though the last person it mentions (as son of Ealdwulf) is 'Elric' where AC has AElfwald. This is either a mis-transcription, or else Elric is a brother of AElfwald (but not necessarily a king). Presumably the HB compiler has got hold of a list and is building it into his work as best he can, but being in Wales his knowledge is less than an English compiler's might be, and he is translating. He makes the son of Hryp (Rippan) to be 'Guillem Guechan' (as if 'Uehha' was an epithet, not another person), and then says 'Ipse primus regnavit in Brittannia super gentem Estanglorum'. Therefore he has not even realised that (as AC shows) Guillem (i.e. Uilhelm) and Guechan (ie Uehha) are two separate people, though he then goes on to say that Guechan genuit Guffan (Uffa). I feel sure that Barbara Yorke has read this very carefully, but her comment is based on the assumption that AC is correct in making Wehha and Wilhelm into two people, and that, whatever 'Nennius' has written, he appears to mean that Wehha was the first to rule. The whole subject of this kind of Anglo-Saxon history is riddled with such minute inflexions of interpretation. My own book, for example, is a mass of such little interpretations, most of which have to pass unexplained, but which are based on three decades studying the subject. Quite possibly many of my interpretations and speculations are wrong, but they are mine, and that's why I put them in a book. For Wikipedia, it is essential to remove a good deal of this speculative layer, though Anglo-Saxon history does not cohere without a little grist of that kind. The art, of which after 30 years I am only a rather feeble practitioner, is to weave it all together on the basis of a very wide knowledge of sources and inferences: but to carry them only part of the way that they are capable of going, for every idea and every interpretation has its lunatic extension into fantasy - and (as Houston Stewart Chamberlain (oddly enough) said), 'fanciful history is an idiot asylum.'. To see a master of Anglo-Saxon history at work, read Sir Frank Stenton's 'Anglo-Saxon England' in the Oxford Histories, (3rd Edition, 1971), and be impressed by what he does NOT say.

The difficulty with even mentioning this viking business here, is that we don't know what may or may not have been destroyed by vikings. To say that there was information, but that it has been destroyed, is argumentative, and presumes something we cannot know. probably there was something ... possibly the vikings destroyed it... but we don't know either of these facts for sure, and wikipedia isn't the place to argue this in specific cases, because we would end up arguing the same argument in every pre-viking biography.

Concerning Bede and the mediaeval chroniclers, again, we are not going to explain these every time we mention them. They have their own articles, and one gets to a full explanation of them by a click of the cursor on the wikilink on Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica, William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, etc etc. That's how wikipedia works. Otherwise every article that uses Bede as a source will duplicate the information about Bede. It's just plain unneccessary. These are not stand-alone articles: Of course if you were writing down your version of the Raedwald story for a group of people that had never heard of Bede and didn't have access to an immediate source - in a teaching pack, for instance - then you would need to do that. But here, quite specifically, you don't want to do that at all, because the place for the explanation of who Bede is is in the article on Bede.

Do let me have your reaction to what I've put on the other discussion page. best wishes Dr Steven Plunkett 10:50, 6 July 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks for taking such a lot of time on these comments. You've given me a lot to think about.  I'd like to suggest that the best way to discuss this material is to take it bit by bit -- there's obviously a lot that could be written here, and I don't want to drown us both in virtual ink.


 * You make three points above: about Wehha, about the Vikings, and about excessive explanations. Let's stick to those three for now, and if we can agree on those we can talk about the points you raise on the draft talk page.


 * I think all three of the points you make can be traced to the same issue: what is the appropriate level of detail? In the case of Yorke's comment about Wehha you provide a good deal of additional detail, but if I understand you correctly your point is that it should not be included because it is speculative -- informed, reasoned speculation, but still not known to be fact.  The same thing is true with the Vikings; it may be likely that documents existed and likely that the Vikings destroyed them, but it can't be said for certain.


 * For Bede, William of Malmesbury, and so on, you suggest that the wikilinking can take care of contextual information about these sources; and a similar argument could be applied to the Viking comment again: if it is worth mentioning, it should be mentioned once, in an article about the effect on the historical record of the Viking raid, and referenced from anywhere else that needs to mention it. (I know I'm simplifying your statements somewhat, but I hope I have captured the gist.)


 * In a sense, this is a question of editorial style; it's not that the content I am adding is wrong (though of course some of it was); it's that it was out of scope. My preference, obviously, has been to provide this additional material in the body of the article, in order to give the reader a coherent body of knowledge (and informed speculation) in a single article.  I want to make it clear that I am quite willing to give this up if it turns out that the consensus is that your approach is preferred.  I don't know of a policy or guideline on what level of detail should be included.  What I'm going to do is post a query in a couple of places that might point me in the right direction -- at the talk page for WP:FAC, where featured article candidates are discussed, and I may also post a note at the biography portal if there's a suitable forum for asking the question.  I would think this has come up many times, and if there's a well-established consensus I'd rather find out about that before we spend time on discussing it.


 * I'll post at WT:FAC; you may want to follow that conversation and comment there if anyone answers my question. If we get no guidance on precedent we can pick this back up in a few days.   Thanks.  Mike Christie (talk) 01:17, 7 July 2007 (UTC)


 * Well, there is an answer there, but it wasn't what I was hoping for -- it just pointed me at policies I already knew about. So I think there is probably nothing.  I may also post to one of the discussion forms at WikiProject Middle Ages to see if anyone else wants to weigh in.


 * In the meantime, though, let me add a comment or two making the case for additional details. I think the reader should have enough information to be able to understand the subject of the article without having to make distracting visits to other hyperlinked articles to clarify what he or she is reading.  I don't think a full description of Bede's work and background is necessary, but a half-sentence of description is good, and an introductory paragraph on source texts seems a good idea to me too.  Hunter Blair's "Roman Britain and Early England", which was one of the first books I read on this period, starts with a chapter called "The Nature of the Sources", and I found this immensely useful in understanding and accepting the vagueness that is necessary in discussing this period.  I also like this comment from the introduction to Richard Fletcher's "Who's Who in Roman Britain and Anglo-Saxon England":


 * The paucity of our information explains the reiterated expressions of caution with which the following pages are so thickly strewn. Readers who are unacquainted with the period and the evidence may find that this tiresome feature undermines their confidence in the author.  Encountering for the umpteenth time the phrase 'It is not impossible that', they will doubtless mutter petulantly 'This fellow doesn't seem to know his stuff'.  Other readers, who are so acquainted, are likely to accuse me of not being nearly cautious enough in my treatment of controversial matters.  Eyebrows will be raised, tongues clicked in disapproval, breath sharply indrawn.  'So he thinks the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was produced under Alfred's sponsorship, does he?  Just unsuppported assertion too -- not a shred of evidence quoted to back it up!'  All I can say is that I sympathise with both points of view, and that one cannot please everybody.  All historians of distant and ill-documented epochs have to try to steer a course between excessive doubt on the one hand and excessive dogmatism on the other.  All know how easy it is to drift away from it.


 * I think Fletcher's approach is fine for the survey work he produced; and he does give a short bibliography at the end of most of his biographical notes. However, I think that if you include the speculative conclusions (as he does, and as I would like to do) the way to resolve his dilemma is to both mention that it is "possible that" something is so (Fletcher does this), and also to give explicit citations that point out where the claim is made and by whom (and he does not do this).  With the addition of the citations I think the reader benefits by learning about the penumbral material around those facts that are definitely known. Mike Christie (talk) 17:46, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

Did you glance at what I wrote on User talk:Mike Christie/Raedwald draft discussion page? As you say, it is not really worth spilling more ink over this. I think the best thing is to follow the usual wikipedia procedure: you go ahead and make corrections to the article in any way you think fit, and others can edit in the future as they think fit. I have now retired as an editor of Anglo-Saxon articles on wikipedia (since about four months ago) and do not plan to return to the subject here. Could I draw your attention to the many Anglo-Saxon kings articles which do NOT yet exist, and which could usefully be started, or expanded from stubs? There is a wealth of work to do in this field, and in this way you could greatly assist wikipedia and enlarge your output on a broad and blank canvas, and carry your own work through from conception to fulness. Dr Steven Plunkett 07:27, 8 July 2007 (UTC)


 * Yes, I looked at what you wrote, and I think you make some excellent points there. I think your best suggestion, though, is for me to work only on the kings articles that are currently stubs or little more than stubs.  That's actually what I have been doing, mostly; Raedwald is a bit of an exception, and I now think it was a mistake for me to work on the article.


 * It would take us a long time to come to an agreement on exactly what should be in the Raedwald article, and frankly I think it's a very good article as it stands, so it's just not worth the effort. I was certainly trying to improve it, but if you and I are the only two editors working on it, and can't easily agree, I think it should be left alone.  We can leave this discussion here, with the link to the draft version (which is in the history anyway); if any other editors finds anything in my version they think is useful they can add it.  Meanwhile, as you suggest, I'll go off and work on other articles -- probably Ine of Wessex next.


 * Thanks for all your helpful comments. I hope you don't abandon WP completely, and that you contribute under your new username -- you're a very valuable and knowledgeable contributor and it's been a pleasure reading your work.  By the way, I wanted to let you know I followed your advice on another article we discussed, and ordered a copy of your book "Suffolk in Anglo-Saxon Times", which I am now partway through and am enjoying.  I also got hold of your article on "The Mercian Perspective" in Sally Foster's "The St Andrews Sarcophagus"; thanks for that reference too.  Good luck with your next projects, and of course with your health too.  Thanks -- Mike Christie (talk) 15:53, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

Citations missing, possibly original work
There is a serious lack of in-line citations here. When citing Bede, can you also cite your secondary source, unless you have an original copy yourself? There is also a suggestion of original research, which seems to be quite common among Pre-Norman England articles on wikipedia. WikiP is not a place to interpret sources, that is covered in the article WP:original research. Matthewcgirling (talk) 09:25, 16 October 2010 (UTC)

Raedwald's Crown?
It is stated in "A topographical and historical description of the county of Suffolk", by John Kirby (http://books.google.com/books?id=vQAIAAAAQAAJ, page 123) that a crown was found at Rendlesham that may have belonged to Raedwald. Kirby cites an older source, the historian William Camden ("Cambden"). The crown weighed about 60 ounces and was sold and melted down(!) Later in his book (page 305) Kirby says the crown was found at Mendlesham. According to Westwood and Simpson, "The Lore of the Land" (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lore-Land-Englands-Legends-Spring-heeled/dp/0141007117) this discovery was made about 1687. This fact or legend may be worth of inclusion in this or some related article. 24.27.31.170 (talk) 03:23, 23 February 2012 (UTC) Eric

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Sutton Hoo artefacts probably related to (Sax0-)Frisian jewellery
Dear reader(s), I read: "There are also significant differences, and exact parallels with the workmanship and style of the Sutton Hoo artefacts cannot be found elsewhere; as a result the connection is generally regarded as unproven." Many scholars around the world have agreed, however, that the artefacts found in the mound of Wijnaldum (Frisia, nowadays Friesland in the Netherlands), especially the Brooch (that could have been made by the same of similarly inspired/trained smith) are in fact very familar to the artefacts found in Sutton Hoo. The dating is similar and fits right in the generally supported impression of a greater North Sea culture, exchanging gifts, goods and DNA. Here I submit some (rapidly collected) links, so that you may decide for yourselves whether or not to incorporate the above said in the existing text or not. https://www.friesmuseum.nl/en/collection/icons/fibula-from-wijnaldum https://studenttheses.universiteitleiden.nl/access/item%3A2660086/view Addressing the (small) differences in more technical detail and dating: http://www.lcm.rug.nl/lcm/teksten/teksten_uk/gold_disc_on_bow_brooch_uk.htm https://www.waddenacademie.nl/fileadmin/inhoud/pdf/01-Waddenacademie/Symposium_Husum/Presentaties/16._johan_nicolay.pdf

Hope you will find it all useful.

Best, Sipke Hoekstra Sipke Hoekstra (talk) 15:29, 11 September 2023 (UTC)