The shelter which King Anna gave to the fugitive Cenwalh was an act of generous courage in the ruler of a country which had already suffered much and was to suffer more at the hands of the terrible Penda. It will be remembered that Redwald, King of East Anglia, who had shown hospitality to Edwin, died a heathen, though more than tolerant of Christianity; but his successor, Earpwald (617–28), yielding to the persuasions of the Northumbrian king, allowed himself to be baptised. After a short reign Earpwald was assassinated by a worshipper of the old gods.[69] Heathenism and anarchy then prevailed in East Anglia for three years, at the end of which time Sigebert the Learned, brother or half-brother of Earpwald, returned from Gaul, in which country he had spent some years, having incurred for some reason the hatred of Redwald. In Gaul he had become a Christian and had pursued those studies which had procured for him his surname “the Learned”. When raised to the East Anglian throne, he successfully attempted the reconversion of the country to Christianity, from which it never afterwards relapsed. He also--a noteworthy fact--“established a school in which boys might be instructed in letters,” following herein the example set him by the King of Kent, and bringing his school teachers from Canterbury. In all his works, scholastic and religious, he was zealously aided by Felix, a missionary-bishop from Burgundy, who had fixed the seat of his episcopate at Dunwich, a city on the coast of Suffolk, long since swallowed up by the ocean. While the trained ecclesiastic, Felix, supplied the organising and educating influences needed by the infant Church of East Anglia, an enthusiastic energy was imparted to it by an Irish monk named Fursa, a man of vivid imagination, full of his marvellous revelations of the world of spirits, one whom, when we read the story of his visions as it is told us by Bede, we are almost persuaded to call the unlettered Dante of the seventh century. As men in Florence said when they saw the poet pass, “That man has been in hell,” so the awe-struck Angles of Norfolk and Suffolk noted on the cheek and shoulder of Fursa the scars of the burning inflicted upon him for a slight offence by the foul fiends whom he had seen in one of his visions; and they remembered how in the depths of winter, and though he was thinly clad, the sweat streamed down his face while he rehearsed the terrible story.