Tytila of East Anglia

Tytila
King of the East Angles
'Tytla Wuffing' from the Textus Roffensis
Reign	possibly from about 578 to about 616.
Predecessor	Wuffa
Successor	Rædwald
Religion	pagan

Tytila (died around 616) was a semi-historical pagan king of East Anglia, a small Anglo-Saxon kingdom which today includes the English counties of Norfolk and Suffolk. Early sources, including Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, identify him as an early member of the Wuffingas dynasty who succeeded his father Wuffa. A later chronicle dates his reign from 578, but he is not known to have definitely ruled as king and nothing of his life is known. He is listed in a number of genealogical lists.

A number of later mediaeval sources recorded that in about 616, Tytila was succeeded by his son Rædwald.

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, and by the beginning of the seventh century, southern England was almost entirely under their control. 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. 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.

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...' . 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. 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 Roffensis.