Wessex

:This article concerns the English kingdom, not the Westland Wessex helicopter

Revival

The English author Thomas Hardy used a fictionalised south-west as a setting for many of his novels, reviving the term 'Wessex' for southwest England. His Wessex included all the counties mentioned in the previous paragraph apart from Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire, along with Devon. He gave the counties the following fictionalised names: Berkshire = North Wessex; Devon = Lower Wessex; Dorset = South Wessex; Hampshire = Upper Wessex; Somerset = Outer Wessex; Wiltshire = Mid-Wessex. Neighbouring Cornwall was described as Off-Wessex or Lyonesse.

Related Topics:
Thomas Hardy - Devon - Lyonesse

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There is a movement in modern day south-central England to create a regional cultural and political identity in Wessex. This consists of three distinct but interlinked organisations. The Wessex Regionalist Party is a registered political party which contests elections. The Wessex Constitutional Convention is an all-party pressure group in which those sympathetic to Wessex devolution who are not members of the Wessex Regionalist Party can also be represented. The Wessex Society is a cultural society which promotes a cultural identity for Wessex while remaining neutral on questions of political devolution.

Related Topics:
Wessex Regionalist Party - Wessex Constitutional Convention - Pressure group - Wessex Society

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The boundaries of Wessex were unclear and subject to dispute. The Wessex Constitutional Convention and Wessex Society add Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire to Hardy's list; and the Wessex Regionalists, who currently use Hardy's definition of Wessex, are likely to follow suit in the near future. This definition of Wessex has been criticised from a number of quarters. For example a number of people within Devon, southern Somerset and parts of Dorset see those areas as sharing a Dumnonian Celtic identity with Cornwall, whereas some regard Hardy's definition as correct on the grounds that the counties north of the Thames, along with Berkshire and north-east Somerset, were part of Mercia for most of the Anglo-Saxon period. There are also a few in Hampshire who argue that southern Hampshire and the Isle of Wight were once a Jutish province in their own right and deserve to be treated differently to the rest of Wessex. The Wessex regionalist movements defend their 8-shire definition of Wessex as being justifiable in terms of both history and modern regional geography, and point to the impossibility of pleasing everyone as an argument against change at the present time, though they do not rule out the possibility of change in the future if the popular will demands it.

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