Sigebert of East Anglia

The Holy Right-⁠Believing Sigebert was king of East Anglia, in what is now north-⁠eastern England, in the seventh century, the first English king to receive baptism and a Christian education before coming to the throne and the first to abdicate in order to enter monastic life. He fell in battle around 636. His feast is on 27 September.

The principal source is Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Sigebert was probably a younger son of Rædwald, king of East Anglia, or his stepson, from a marriage to a pagan princess from Essex. Nothing is known of his life before he was exiled to Gaul, perhaps so that Rædwald's own line should rule. There, at the court of the Frankish king Chlothar II, he was baptised and received a good education. After the murder of his step-⁠brother Eorpwald, around 627, he returned to East Anglia and, perhaps after a campaign, became king, ruling jointly with Ecgric, a relative of Rædwald, who probably remained a pagan. Under Sigebert the Christianisation of East Anglia advanced greatly. Alliances were strengthened with the Christian kingdoms of Kent and Northumbria. Saint Felix came to the country to help him establish the episcopal see at Dommoc, and Sigebert founded a school for teaching Latin, on the model of the one in which he had studied in Francia, and gave the Irish monk Saint Fursey a site for a monastery at Cnobheresburg (perhaps Burgh Castle).

In the end he handed his power to Ecgric and retired to his monastery at Beodricesworth. Later East Anglia was attacked by an army of Mercia, led by King Penda. Ecgric and the East Anglians asked Sigebert to lead them in battle; he refused and had to be dragged from the monastery to the battlefield. He would not bear arms and, in the battle in which both kings were slain and the army destroyed, he died as a man of peace.