Suffolk History
Suffolk is a county of historic origins located in East Anglia, England. It shares its borders with Norfolk to the north, Essex in the South and Cambridgeshire to the west. To the East of Suffolk lies the North Sea. The major towns are Lowestoft, Ipswich and Bury St Edmunds, of which Suffolk was carved out from the southern part of the Kingdom of East Anglia which was settled by the Angles in the second half of the 5th century. The major Anglo-Saxon settlements were possibly near Sudbury and Ipswich of which Ipswich is the county town. Suffolk was not established as a separate shire only in 1575, till then the administration of Norfolk and Suffolk was managed by a single sheriff. Suffolk’s boundary has undergone very little change; however the area has been considerably eaten into by sea erosion. Gorleston and Thetford, which had earlier been a part of Suffolk is now controlled by the Norfolk administration. Under the Government Act of 1888 Suffolk
The Kingdom of the East Angles traces its origins to the year 520 when the North and South Folk merged. These were Angles who had settled in the ancient lands of the Iceni in the previous century. For a short period East Angelica was the most powerful Anglo-Saxon kingdom in England, this was when it had decimated the kingdom of Northumbra in the year 616. However the kingdom was not successful in keeping the title as it was defeated by the Mercians twice. East Anglian independence was restored by a rebellion in which two Mercian Kings lost their lives. It was on 20 November 870 that the Danes captured and killed King Edmund and christened the land as East Anglia. The Saxons were able to regain possession of the land in 920, but lost it again in 1015-1017 when Canute the Great conquered it and gave it as fiedom to Thorkell the Tall. Much of East Anglia comprised of swampy marshlands and bogs, and things remained so in spite of the Romans constructing early sea barriers.
By the middle of the seventeenth century, the flooded alluvial land was transformed in to arable land by the systematic way of drainage made possible by a diverting the drains and rivers in a peculiar way. East Anglia thus became a wealthy part of the country, but it was short lived as the Industrial Revolution started shifting manufacturing to the mainlands and north of the country. During WWII, the RAF and the American Air Force had constructed numerous air bases in the East Anglia regions. This was basically intended to provide a launching point for heavy bombers in a combined offensive against the Nazi occupied Germany. There was a reason to choose East Anglia as the base, the county featured open and mostly terrains, moreover it was relatively in proximity to the continent. This allowed the allies to shorten the flight times and allowed for deadlier payloads. The remnant of these bases are still scattered all over the county and make for interesting visits.