A HISTORY OF NORFOLK King Sigbert lived ; but in 637 there came a catastrophe. Penda, the heathen king of Mercia (or middle England), burst in upon East Anglia, and in the battle that ensued Sigbert was slain. Felix the bishop nevertheless stayed at his post, and was earnestly supported by the next king, Anna, as devoted a proselytizer as his predecessor ; but when Penda came again three years later and harried the country, Fursa the Irish monk, in despair of being able to live a life of devotion in so disturbed a land, turned his back upon East Anglia and retired to Frankland. Felix, nothing daunted, appears to have gone on labouring without hindrance or molestation till his death in 647. In the twenty-five years that passed after the death of Felix, the names of three bishops of the as yet undivided see have come down to us,^ Bisi, the last of them, being consecrated it is said in the year 669. In May of this year the great Archbishop Theodore landed in England, and the whole English church accepted him as primate. This is not the place to tell of the im- portance of Theodore's career, or the wonderful and statesmanlike reform which he carried out during the twenty-one years of his primacy. One of the earliest of these reforms and one which he had very much at heart, was to effect a sub-division of the English dioceses in cases where the territorial sees were too large to be worked effectively by a single bishop. The old age of Bisi and his infirmities gave the primate his opportunity, and in the year 671 (.), Bisi was prevailed upon to resign. Hereupon the East Anglian diocese was divided into two,^ the original see which had been seated at Dunwich being relieved of its northern half, and over that northern half a second bishop was appointed. 7?Lcci, of whom we know nothing but his name, became accordingly bishop of Dunwich, and had his residence among and jurisdiction over the ' south folk,' and a certain Badwine was sent as bishop of the ' north folk,' with his residence at Elmham,' five miles from East Dereham, where it is said that Withberga, a daughter of Anna, king of East Anglia, founded, or began to found, a monastery which came to nought, possibly during the times of the Danish invasion. It was in 838 that the Danes made their first descent upon Norfolk.* In 866 a great heathen army of them came again, and ' took winter quarters among the Angles and were there horsed.' ' Four years later ' they took winter quarters at Thetford.' Thence they turned to the country of the Gyrwas. This desolate and uninviting district, a region of lonely morasses, had nevertheless become a kind of holy land, in which four or five monas- teries had grown up, the monks maintaining a life of prayer and praise, practising austerities, and perhaps carrying on some educational work, which ' (1) Thomas, born in the fenbnd among the Gyrwas ; (2) Berectgih, ' cognomine Bonifacius' (Bede, iii, 20) ; and (3) Bh'i, probably an East Anglian. (Bede. iv, 5.) ' Bede, op cit, iv, 5. ^ Probably North Elmham. The division of the East Anglian see took place immediately after the council held at Hertford in September, 673, at which Bisi attended (Bede, op cit. iv, 5 ; Hadden and Stubbs, Councils and Eccl. Doc. iii, 118, where see the notes) ; the signature of Badwine appears in a charter of 693, Birch, Cart. Sax. i. No. 85 ; see, too, Stubbs, Reg. Sacr. Anglic. 240. The ancient lists of East Anglian bishops during the next century and a half give us ten or eleven bishops of Dunwich ; the last of them was Wilred, who was alive in 845. Contemporaneous with these Dunwich prelates we find ten bishops of Elmham. After Wilred there are no more Dunwich bishops mentioned, the see having become merged into the Norfolk bishopric. William of Malmesbury tells us that during the period when Ludecan was king of the Mercians and Burhed was making his stand against the Danes (a.d. 825-75), East Anglia was so devastated that the bishops were reduced to great poverty, insomuch that the double bishopric came to an end, ' et ex duobus unus factus, sedem apud Helm- ham, villam non adeo magnam, accepit.' Will, of Malmcs, Gesta Pontif. (Rolls Ser.), 148.
- Anglo-Sax. Chnn. anno 838 ; Green's Conquest of England, 77. ' Anglo-Sax. Chron. anno 866.
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