Tyttla, king of East Anglia

ref: Tyttla (King) of EAST ANGLIA

    aka Tytillus (Tytila) of the DEIRI; VVFFING

    Born:   ?   Died:  abt. 593 The peoples known to us as the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians, began to arrive in Britain in the 5th century. By 600, a number of kingdoms had begun to form in southern and eastern Britain,[1] and by the beginning of the seventh century, southern England was almost entirely under their control.[2] Tytila was a member of the Wuffingas family, the ruling dynasty of the Kingdom of the East Angles that was named after his father Wuffa. The Wuffingas may have been descendants of an earlier Scandinavian dynasty.[3][4] Both he and his father are semi-historical figures.

The Victorian ethnologist John Beddoe noted the similarity between the name Tytila and that of Totila, an Ostrogoth king.[5]

Tytila is included in a number of different tallies. In the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which was completed in Northumbria by Bede in 731, Tytila is named as the father of Rædwald and the son of Wuffa: 'Erat autem praefatus rex Reduald natu nobilis, quamlibet actu ignobilis, filius Tytili, cuius pater fuit Uuffa...' .[6] The 9th century Welsh monk Nennius, in his Historia Brittonum, also lists Tytila, naming him as the father of Eni of East Anglia: '...Uffa, who begat Tytillus, who begat Eni,...' whilst relating the origin of the kings of East Anglia.[7] Tytila is included in an East Anglian royal tally that lists the ancestors of Ælfwald and that names many, but not all, of the early East Anglian kings. The tally, which forms part of the Anglian collection, comes from the 12th century Textus