Æthelberht II of East Anglia
Urged to marry against his will, he apparently agreed to wed Eadburh, the daughter of Offa of Mercia, and set out to visit her, despite his mother's forebodings and his experiences of terrifying events—an earthquake, a solar eclipse and a vision.
[4] This story is recounted in later saints' lives by Osbert of Clare and Gerald of Wales, and elements of it were borrowed into the histories of William of Malmesbury, Roger of Wendover, Matthew Paris and Richard of Cirencester, among other later medieval chroniclers.
On one side is the word REX, with an image of Romulus and Remus suckling a wolf: the obverse names the King and his moneyer, Lul, who also struck coins for Offa and Coenwulf of Mercia.
[7] The numismatist Marion Archibald notes that the issuing of "flattering" coins of this type, with the intention to win friends in Rome, probably indicated that as a sub-king, Æthelberht, was assuming "a greater degree of independence than [Offa] was prepared to tolerate".
[6] According to the British numismatist Rory Naismith, "Æthelberht’s coins could have been issued over a number of years, either during a spell when some or all of East Anglia asserted independence from Offa, or by some sort of arrangement to share minting rights with the Mercian ruler.
[11] Æthelberht's claim to belong to the ruling Wuffingas dynasty, suggested by the use of a Roman she-wolf and the title REX on his coins, arose from the need for strong kingship in response to the Viking attacks.
According to the historian Andy Todd Æthelberht was killed at the royal estate of Sutton in Herefordshire,[12] while Michael Lapidge locates the murder at the nearby village of Marden.
Roger of Wendover in the 13th century, whose account is borrowed by Matthew Paris, offers a story in which Cynethryth personally oversees a trap in which Æthelberht falls into a pit in his bedroom, at the bottom of which her executioners were waiting.
Another 15th-century text, Chronicon attributed to John Brompton, reports how the king's detached head fell off a cart into a ditch where it was found, before it restored a blind man's sight.
The church is mentioned in the will of Theodreusus, Bishop of London and Hoxne (c. 938 – c. 951), which is a possible indication of the existence of a religious cult devoted to the saintly king.
The historian Lawrence Butler has argued that this unusual pattern may be explained by the existence of a royal cult in East Anglia, which represented a "revival of Christianity after the Danish settlement by commemorating a politically 'safe' and corporeally distant local ruler".
