Lives in Cricket No 15 - Michael Falcon

Introduction East Anglia and Cricket Early Saxon England was divided into numerous petty kingdoms with each struggling for pre-eminence. The most influential king at any time was given the title of Bretwalda. In the early seventh century the Bretwalda was Raedwald, who was leader of the kingdom of the East Angles (which stretched over the modern counties of Suffolk, Norfolk and Essex) and was a member of the Wuffinga dynasty. After he died, the power of his successors waned and East Anglia lost its political supremacy, never to regain it. The kingdom was already in decline before the destructive raids of the Vikings led to chaos and upheaval. When East Anglia was restored to Saxon rule, the region prospered again. In late Saxon and early Norman England, Norwich was one of the largest towns in the kingdom and the rural economy was booming. Some evidence of this is found in the presence of large numbers of round-tower churches in the county of Norfolk. More evidence is found in the Domesday Book, which reveals the region to be an economic powerhouse. Norwich became even more important, meriting a fine cathedral. The existence of over sixty medieval churches in Norwich attests to its continuing prosperity and its position at the heart of the most productive arable land in the country contributed to its growth so that, between the sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries, Norwich was the second largest city in the kingdom. East Anglian agriculture was genuinely innovative as the development of the ‘Norfolk rotation’ method of farming was invented. Then, however, the Industrial Revolution took place and East Anglia as a whole, lacking in the relevant raw materials, began to fall behind. Norfolk’s geographic isolation also told against it and the county became a rural backwater as quickly as the early nineteenth century. Whilst the county town can boast of the ‘Norwich School’ of painting, the choice facing most people of talent and ambition was clear: in order to achieve success you had to leave Norfolk and follow the money. 7