East Anglia is not, and has never been in modern times, an official administrative area of England. The label ‘East Anglia’ is one that applies to a notional cultural and topographical region which, like ‘The Midlands’, or ‘The Highlands’, or ‘The Midwest’, is widely understood, but which refers to an area whose boundaries are ill-defined. Such areas tend to have indisputable centres and vague margins, and East Anglia is no exception. The counties of Norfolk and Suffolk would be agreed by everyone to be prototypically East Anglian, but there has always been doubt (Trudgill 1974: 7) as to whether the Fens should be included in East Anglia or not. As David Britain points out in Chapter 11 of this book, the Fens were mostly uninhabited until fairly recently, and the cultural alignments of this region are therefore more difficult to judge. If they are to be excluded, then even the Fenland part of Norfolk will have an ambiguous status. If all the Fens are to be included, on the other hand, then East Anglia might have to include also parts of Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire (now part of Cambridgeshire), and the Soke of Peterborough (now part of Cambridgeshire but historically part of Northamptonshire). Classification by other writers (see below) means that we also have to consider the status of the immediately neighbouring counties of Essex, Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire.

One can attempt to define East Anglia historically in terms of the area covered by the original East Anglian kingdom. Even the boundaries of this kingdom are not known with total certainty, however. Seymour (1988) tells us that ‘historically the East Anglian kingdom did not extend south of the Stour into Essex, nor west of the Cam’. This would give us an East Anglia consisting of Norfolk, Suffolk and eastern Cambridgeshire. In his Companion Guide to East Anglia, Seymour nevertheless includes the whole of modern Cambridgeshire and says ‘this is, I believe, the generally accepted definition of East Anglia among East Anglians today’. Wilson (1977), however, takes a much broader view, including also Essex, Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire under his definition. Many other examples of disagreement and alternative arrangements could be given.