The nomadic Huns briefly dominated most of Europe north of the Roman frontier from the 420s until the early 450s, when inter-sibling civil war following the death of Atilla caused the rapid collapse of the empire and its contraction into a small sub-tribe of the Turkic-speaking Bulgars by the early 6th century. We only know of them due to surviving Roman accounts and fragments of archaeological evidence, such as objects with the characteristic Hunnic cloisonné gold-working style, and so the northern, western and eastern extents of their territory are much more poorly understood, with both kinds of evidence scarce or non-existent.
As I touched on in a previous post, there are hints that the Huns went beyond the traditional territory assumed for them - central and eastern Europe - mostly coming from the Roman writer Priscus, who writes (in a paraphrased passage from the 9th century account of the Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII, the Constantinian Excerpts), that Attila claimed he was ruler of all the 'islands in the Ocean'. There are also Hunnic-sounding names in Norse royal genealogies, and 'Asiatic' facial features represented on 5th century Scandinavian medallions, which indicates at least that the Huns' influence was widespread. Bede also mentions, when describing the inhabitants of Old Saxony (i.e. northern Germany), that the Huns were among the early migrants making up Anglo-Saxon England. These have all been discussed extensively over the last two decades, and I won't reheat their arguments here.
However, there are two notices - fragments of evidence - that are worth exploring in more detail, and have escaped nearly all scholarly mention. The first is the little town of Attleborough in East Anglia, which appears to derive from the Anglo-Saxon for 'stronghold belonging to Aetla'. This would be just an interesting coincidence if not for a folktale, recorded by the 12th century chronicler Geoffrey of Wells in his De infantia sancti Eadmundi, or the tale of the youth of Saint Edmund, where he claims that 'according to earlier tradition', the 'ancient city' of Attlesborough was founded by one King Athla. The 15th-century life of St Edmund by John Lydgate adds that Edmynd arrived at the town after coming ashore at the port of Hunstanton, a town by the river Hun. While we can take the latter claim with several barrels of salt, this 'earlier tradition' mentioned by Geoffrey could be an authentic oral tradition, or else a folk etymology inspired by real descendants of Huns living in early medieval England.
The second is another anecdote mentioned in passing by the early 13th century Romance of Waldef, a tale set in a mythical time, in a mythical East Anglia, between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Norman conquest of England. It essentially tries to combine various folk legends into a linear foundation myth for the historical kingdom, and involves the legendary king Arthur heavily as a king under pressure from Roman tribute and Germanic invaders. About midway in the romance, it mentions that after Arthur's death, a king called Attala briefly arose in Norfolk who personally duelled with Unwine, the 'king of Thetford', in Suffolk, who won and ushered in harmony across the land. This appears to contradict the traditional chronology for Arthur (who, if he existed in any form at all, lived well after the collapse of the Hunnic empire), but then again there is no suggestion that the author of the romance was conscious of a connection between his folktale Attala, and the historical Attila.
Unwine has been linked by scholars from the 1920s onwards with another legendary king, Hunuil, who is mentioned as a pre-historic king of the Goths by the 6th-century Gothic writer Jordanes, in his Getica. There are an abundance of Norse sagas, chiefly the Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks, that describe a great war between the Goths and the Huns. Could this romantic folklale, therefore, reflect an battle between Hunnic and Gothic / Germanic mercenaries, in the early 5th century, that took place on British soil? Although two Hunnic-style belt buckles have been found in the British Isles, close to a number of Germanic-style belt buckles, it seems more likely that a memory of some historical conflict between Huns and Goths, or between Huns and any other Germanic group, was transferred as a folktale during the gradual migration to England during the 5th and 6th centuries CE.
In support of this, Unwine's capital Thetford was indeed a royal centre both in the late Iron Age, as a tribal capital of the Iceni, and of the East Angles in the early medieval period. It ended up as the 6th largest town in Britain by the time of the Domesday Book. The town was connected to the North Sea through the snaking tributaries of the Great Ouse; even if it was never the capital of a Dark Age warlord, it is easy to see why the author of the Romance thought it could be one.
So, there is a chance that a local tradition about King Attala ruling from Attlesborough existed, one that was influenced by continental traditions about a war between Goths and Huns, that survived into the 12th and 13th centuries to be built upon by Norman romancers. It is also interesting that a number of early medieval East Anglians bear the family name Hunas or Hune, for instance the 7th century St.Hunna, the chaplain of East Anglian king Anna's daughter, Aethelfryth, who later retired to contemplate on an island in the Fens called Huneia.
A tempting conclusion could be drawn from this; rather than these names and legends being an echo of a former Hunnic incursion onto British (or East Anglian) soil, they are imports from Scandinavia. As mentioned above, the Hunnic impression on early medieval Scandinavia is well-documented, and based on the material finds on Sutton Hoo and elsewhere, the East Anglian royal dynasty is thought to have emigrated from the area of modern-day Sweden. The connection is more evident once the legendary kings of Sweden are taken into account; the most famous among them Adillus, Ottar and Roo, which have plausibly been linked with Attila, Octar (Attila's great-uncle) and Ruga (Attila's brother) respectively.
But it is there any archaeology to back this all up? The custom of mound-burial seen at Sutton Hoo, Snape and other East Anglian sites, although obviously indebted to Bronze Age and Neolithic barrows in the area, may derive from cultures of the steppe, which the Huns would have brought along with them in their unceasing expansion across Europe. The same conclusion has been reached about a group of tumuli in southern Germany, which was in the late 5th century the territory of the elite Heruli tribe, some of which later migrated north to Scandinavia and introduced the burial custom there. However, the East Anglian mounds can then be considered more likely an import from Scandinava and the Heruli - the latter probably introduced the title of eril, later earl, to the Anglo-Saxons - than from the Huns.
All in all then, what can be said is that the makeup of early medieval England is vastly more complex than the handful of written sources from the period indicate. It is unclear whether the Romance of Waldef and the vita of St. Edmund written a century later are independent of each other, but nevertheless it points to a strong local tradition, preserving the memory of a time when East Anglia was intimately connected to the world of the continent. It is likely that Huns did arrive in Britain in small numbers - not enough for Attila to rightly claim overship over it - but enough to leave their trace in folktales, place-names, personal names and the archaeological record.
References:
Bell, A. (1950). Gaimar's Early “Danish” Kings. PMLA, 65(4), 601-640.
Brett, C. (1920). Hunuil-Unwine-Unwen. The Modern Language Review, 15, 77.
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