8 March: East Anglia Day

Today is East Anglia Day. 10 things you might not know about East Anglia:

1. East Anglia is generally deemed to consist of Norfolk, Suffolk, parts of Cambridgeshire and the Isle of Ely which was added on the marriage of East Anglian princess Æthelthryth. Some definitions include Essex as well.

2. East Anglia is bordered to the north and east by the North Sea, to the south by the estuaries of the rivers Orwell and Stour, and to the west an undefined land border with the rest of England.

3. The name derives from the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of the East Angles. The Angles were a people from Anglia, a region of modern day Germany.

4. The kingdom of East Anglia was formed around 520 as a merger between the North Folk and the South Folk, that is the Angles who’d settled there about a century earlier.

5. The first king of East Anglia was Wehha, "The first to rule over the East Angles", according to Nennius. Wehha Died in 571.

6. The symbol of East Anglia is a shield of three golden crowns, placed two above one, on a Blue background, which has been used since Medieval times. The arms are effectively identical to the coat of arms of Sweden. The modern East Anglian flag, superimposes the blue shield with three crowns on a St George's cross.

7. While Britain experiences about 25 Earthquakes every year, it’s rare for them to occur in East Anglia. In 1994, however, there was an earthquake in Norwich which measured 4.0 on the Richter scale, and in 2008 they felt the effects of a 5.2 quake centred in Lincolnshire.

8. There is little stone for building in the area but plenty of clay and sand, so by the 1800s brick making was a significant industry. White or Grey bricks were common, and houses were often whitewashed in pastel colours like “Suffolk Pink”.

9. Agriculture is another major industry. The region is sometimes referred to as “Britain’s breadbasket” because the climate and soil are ideal for growing cereal crops.

10. In olden times it was a stopping off point for farmers taking animals to market in London. We’re talking before trains were invented and the only way for a Scottish farmer to get his animals to market in London was to walk them there. This could take several months. East Anglia was a good place to stop because of the abundance of grasslands and root crops so the animals could be fattened up before being sold. Farmers of the time would also walk birds, ducks, Turkeys and Geese, to market and the birds were given special shoes to protect their feet.