"Wessex" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ships had long been descending in annual raids on England's shores, gave the youthful monarch an abundance of more active service. For years he fought them, yet in his despite Guthrum, one of their ablest chiefs, sailed up the Severn, seized upon a wide region of the realm of Wessex, made Gloucester his capital, and defied the feebly-supported ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... their supremacy, not by destructive inroads, but by a gradual process of colonization, settling among the native Welsh and allowing them to hold lands under equal laws. The final incorporation of the district which is now Devonshire with the kingdom of Wessex must have taken place about 766, but the county, and even Exeter, remained partly Welsh until the time of AEthelstan. At the beginning of the 9th century Wessex was divided into definite pagi, probably ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... down from the stronghold on Sinodun Hill, reckoning centuries by human occupation, no one knows or will know. There stands the fortress of some forgotten race, and below it the double rampart of a Roman camp, running from Thame to Isis. Beyond is Dorchester, the abbey of the oldest see in Wessex, and the Abbey Mill. The feet of the hills are clothed by Wittenham Wood, and above the wood stretches the weir, and round to the west, on another great loop of the river, is Long Wittenham and its lovely backwater. Even in winter, when the snow is falling like bags of flour, and the river is ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... it was a suitable union, seeing that Athelwold would inherit power and great possessions from his father, Earldoman of East Anglia, and before long the marriage took place, and by and by Athelwold took his wife to Wessex, to the castle he had built for himself on his estate of Wherwell, on the Test. There they lived together, and as they had married for ...
— Dead Man's Plack and an Old Thorn • William Henry Hudson
... not a barbarian; he fought for the tradition against the barbarians, the nihilists. And for this reason also, for this reason, in the last resort, only, we call the saddest and in some ways the least successful of the Wessex kings by the title of Alfred the Great. Alfred was defeated by the barbarians again and again, he defeated the barbarians again and again; but his victories were almost as vain as his defeats. Fortunately he did not believe in the Time Spirit or the Trend of Things or any ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... again, "While the German princes who reigned at Paris, Toledo, Arles and Ravenna listened with reverence to the instructions of Bishops, adored the relics of martyrs, and took part eagerly in disputes touching the Nicene theology, the rulers of Wessex and Mercia were still performing savage rites in the temples of ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... Irish, for example, the English of the South are learning the possibilities of the aspirate h and wh, which latter had entirely and the former very largely dropped out of use among them a hundred years ago. The drawling speech of Wessex and New England—for the main features of what people call Yankee intonation are to be found in perfection in the cottages of Hampshire and West Sussex—are being quickened, perhaps from the same sources. ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... Southampton to Bristol. Kent was isolated by the Romney marshes and the wild country about Tunbridge, while the western peninsula was a peninsula indeed when the sea ran up to beyond Glastonbury. In this region, then, the later Wessex, we find five main tribes; the men of Kent, the Regni south of the Weald, the Atrebates along the Thames, the Belgae on the Wiltshire Avon, and the Damnonii of Devon and Cornwall, with (perhaps) a sub-tribe of their Name, the ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... which exist now. Northumbria is still a truer thing than Northumberland. Sussex is still Sussex; Essex is still Essex. And that third Saxon kingdom whose name is not even to be found upon the map, the kingdom of Wessex, is called the West Country and is to-day the most real ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... Bullock, writing of the farmers and farm laborers of the North, has not unwisely gone to Mr. Hardy to learn his art. "Irish Pastorals" (1901) is racy of Fermanagh as "Tess" is of Wessex. "The Squireen" (1903) is a strong and gloomy story. From "By Thrasna River" (1895) to "Dan the Dollar" (1905), Mr. Bullock did no story without power in it. Ireland still looks to him as it looked to Mr. ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... stepped from the door of an old and well-appointed inn in a Wessex town to take a country walk. By her look and carriage she appeared to belong to that gentle order of society which has no worldly sorrow except when its jewellery gets stolen; but, as a fact not generally known, her ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... Welsh at Pen, and put them to flight as far as the Parret." "Her Kenwealh gefeaht aet Peonnum with Wealas, and hie geflymde oth Pedridan." Upon this passage Lappenberg in his "England under the Anglo-Saxon kings" remarks: "The reign of Cenwealh is important on account of the aggrandisement of Wessex. He defeated in several battles the Britons of Dyvnaint and Cernau [Devon and Cornwall] who had endeavoured to throw off the Saxon yoke, first at Wirtgeornesburh, afterwards, with more important results, at Bradenford [Bradford] on the Avon in Wiltshire, and again at Peonna [the hill of ...
— A Glossary of Provincial Words & Phrases in use in Somersetshire • Wadham Pigott Williams
... one wonders, yet discovered Rudyard Kipling, or is the Wessex peasant aware of Thomas Hardy? It is odd to think that the last people to read such authors are the very people they most concern. For you might spend your life, say, in studying the London street boy, and write never so movingly and humourously about him, yet would he never know your ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... novelist does not require a universe in which to find the universe, which lies folded, for the sufficiently perceptive eye, in any village. Thoreau and Emerson found it in Concord; Thomas Hardy in Wessex has watched the world move by without himself moving. But Mr. Tarkington has toward his native state the conscious attitude of the booster. Smile as he may at the too emphatic patriotism of this or that ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... Norman knight spurred up to Henry with some communication that made him look uneasy, and Christina, laying her hand on Edgar's arm, said: "Brother, we have vaults. Thy troop outnumbers his. The people of good old Wessex are with thee! Now is thy time! Save thy country. Restore the line and laws ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Teutonic heathenism. In 597 Saint Augustine, "the Apostle to the English," landed in Kent and began the conversion of the people, that year succeeding in converting Ethelbert, King of Kent. In 626 Edwin, King of Northumbria, was converted, and in 635 the English of Wessex accepted Christianity. The English at once became strong supporters of the Christian faith, and in 878 they forced the invading Danes to accept Christianity as one of the conditions of the Peace of ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... oppose them they destroyed by fire and sword. They seized cities, garrisoned and occupied them, and settled in them as if to make them their permanent homes. One kingdom after another was subdued. The kingdom of Wessex seemed alone to remain, and that was the subject of contest. Ethelred was the king. The Danes advanced into his dominions to attack him. In the battle that ensued, Ethelred was killed. The successor to his throne ...
— King Alfred of England - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... note I have only to add that, in the present edition of 'Desperate Remedies,' some Wessex towns and other places that are common to the scenes of several of these stories have been called for the first time by the names under which they appear elsewhere, for the satisfaction of any reader who may care for ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... been spoken of, as well as the conversion of these pagans to Christianity by the representatives of the Roman Church. The several kingdoms founded by the invaders were brought under the overlordship of the southern kingdom of Wessex[83] by Egbert, a contemporary of Charlemagne. But no sooner had the long-continued invasions of the Germans come to an end and the country been partially unified, than the Northmen (or Danes, as the English ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... thither now; for I knew that human companionship, of a sort, and a glass of good liquor—from a store which the Customs would have been happy to locate—awaited me there. I might chance, too, upon Durham or Wessex, of New Scotland Yard, both good friends of mine, or even upon the Terror of Chinatown, Chief Inspector Kerry, a man for whom I had an esteem which none of ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... Christian literature of the period was written in the Northumbrian and the West-Saxon schools. The greatest names of the Northumbrian school are Bede, Cadmon and Cynewulf. The most famous of the Wessex writers is Alfred the Great, who is called "the father of ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... the beach advanced the little group of English, friends and fellow adventurers with the most renowned of all their great queen's buccaneers. Beside Sir Francis himself marched young Harold of Wessex, little more than a boy in years, yet dreaded and feared in his own land even then—a possible heir to Elizabeth's throne. Some short distance in front of these two, standard bearers carried the flags of ...
— Their Mariposa Legend • Charlotte Herr
... constant struggles, either for increase of territory or for supremacy. The kingdoms farthest east—Kent, Sussex, Essex, and East Anglia—found their expansion checked by other kingdoms—Northumbria, Mercia, and Wessex—which grew up in the interior of the island. Each of these three stronger states gained ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... in Germany: he looked on him as his natural ally. Both kingdoms had moreover a common interest as against the free British populations on their western marches, who were allied with each other across the sea: decisive campaigns of Carl the Great and King Egbert of Wessex coincide in point of time, and may have supported ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... naturally. It is due to Meredith to say that no one outside a few of the great Greeks has ever taken Nature so naturally as he did. And it is also due to him to say that no one outside Colney Hatch ever took Nature so unnaturally as it was taken in what Mr. Hardy has had the blasphemy to call Wessex Tales. This division between the two points of view is vital; because the turn of the nineteenth century was a very sharp one; by it we have reached the rapids in which we ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... whole of Scotland from the Pentland Firth to the Forth. In 908, a brother of the King of Scots became King of the Britons of Strathclyde, while Lothian, with the rest of Northumbria, passed under the overlordship of the House of Wessex. We have now arrived at the commencement of the long dispute about the "overlordship". We shall attempt to state the main outlines as ...
— An Outline of the Relations between England and Scotland (500-1707) • Robert S. Rait
... which took place at Brentford, the Danes were again defeated, though not without considerable losses on the side of the victors, many of the Saxons being drowned in trying to ford the river after their flying enemies. Edmund then returned to Wessex to gather fresh troops, and in his absence Canute for the third time laid siege to London. Again the city held out against every attack, and "Almighty God," as the pious chroniclers say, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... One of these tribes then becomes predominant over the rest, through the skill in war or diplomacy of one of its chiefs, and the whole of the tract of country is thus organised into one kingdom. Thus the history of England relates how the kingdom of Wessex grew into predominance over the whole of the country; that of France tells how the kings who ruled over the Isle of France spread their rule over the rest of the land; the history of Israel is mainly an account of how the tribe of Judah obtained the hegemony ...
— The Story of Geographical Discovery - How the World Became Known • Joseph Jacobs
... dream that some spot in the extensive tract whose south-western quarter is here described, may be the heath of that traditionary King of Wessex—Lear. ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... had brought some of the Wessex Territorials from India with two battalions of Gurkhas and two of Rifles. The 1/4th Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry joined it from Aden, but for some months the battalion was not itself. It had spent a long time at that dreary sunburnt outpost of the Empire, and the men did not regain ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... indeed relatively absent from the work of the venerable master who has made 'Wessex' the most vividly realized of all English provinces to-day, and whose prose Egdon Heath may well be put at the head of all the descriptive poetry of our time. But Mr. Hardy, in this respect, belongs to an earlier generation than that ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... home and his fair estate in Wessex; he would not stay in the rich monastery of Nutescelle, even though they had chosen him as the abbot; he had refused a bishopric at the court of King Karl. Nothing would content him but to go out into the wild woods ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... . . At the close of a winter day, Their anchors down, by London town, the Three Great Captains lay; And one was Admiral of the North from Solway Firth to Skye, And one was Lord of the Wessex coast and all the lands thereby, And one was Master of the Thames from Limehouse to Blackwall, And he was Captain of the Fleet—the ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... this charmed spot; and that it remained so fine was but evidence of the care of those to whom she had given strict orders seven years past, that in and out of season it must be ever kept as it had erstwhile been. She had never entered the place since the day the young Marquis of Wessex, whom she had imprisoned for marrying secretly and without her consent, on his release came here, and, with a concentrated bitterness and hate, had told her such truths as she never had heard from man or woman ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... been variously described in sale catalogues as a light-weight hunter, a lady's hack, and, more simply, but still with a touch of imagination, as a useful brown gelding, standing 15.1. Toby Mullet had ridden him for four seasons with the West Wessex; you can ride almost any sort of horse with the West Wessex as long as it is an animal that knows the country. The Brogue knew the country intimately, having personally created most of the gaps that were to be met ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... had been the Wessex dialect, spoken and written at Alfred's capital, Winchester. When the French had displaced this as the language of culture, there was no longer a "king's English" or any literary standard. The sources of modern standard English are to be found in the ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... ended also. Seldom had he felt such a supreme happiness as when he stepped out at Fernhurst station, and between his father and mother walked up the broad, white road that led past the Eversham Hotel to the great grey Abbey, that watches as a sentinel over the dreamy Wessex town. There are few schools in England more surrounded with the glamour of mediaeval days than Fernhurst. Founded in the eighth century by a Saxon saint, it was the abode of monks till the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Then after ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... known that St. Dunstan was an ingenious scribe, and so passionately fond of books, that we may unhesitatingly proclaim him a bibliomaniac. He was a native of Wessex, and resided with his father near Glastonbury Abbey, which holy spot many a legendary tale rendered dear to his youthful heart. He entered the Abbey, and devoted his whole time to reading the wondrous lives ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... the respectable station of inferior freemen, possessed of lands, and entitled to the rights of civil society. [154] Such gentle treatment might secure the allegiance of a fierce people, who had been recently subdued on the confines of Wales and Cornwall. The sage Ina, the legislator of Wessex, united the two nations in the bands of domestic alliance; and four British lords of Somersetshire may be honorably distinguished in the court ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... any one's slave slay a freeman, whoever it be, let the owner pay with a hundred shillings, give up the slayer," &c. /1/ There are several other similar provisions. In the nearly contemporaneous laws of Ine, the surrender and payment are simple alternatives. "If a Wessex slave slay an Englishman, then shall he who owns him deliver him up to the lord and the kindred, or give sixty shillings for his life." /2/ Alfred's laws (A.D. 871-901) have a like provision as to cattle. "If a neat wound a man, let the ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... is an historic relic of singular interest, and a remarkable work of early art. It is the ring of Ethelwulf, King of Wessex (the father of Alfred the Great), who reigned A.D. 836-838, and bears the royal name upon it. It was found in the parish of Laverstock, Hants, in a cart-rut, where it had become much crushed and defaced. ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... Oxford. The Danes, as they followed up the course of the Thames from London, would be drawn thither, sooner or later, and would covet a place which is surrounded by half a dozen deep natural moats. Lastly, Oxford lay in the centre of England indeed, but on the very marches of Mercia and Wessex. A border town of natural strength and of commanding situation, she can have been no mean or poor collection of villages in the days when she is first spoken of, when Eadward the Elder "incorporated with his own kingdom the whole Mercian lands on both sides of Watling Street" ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... Sword versus Sword! Come in, there! (Two mounted Combatants, in leather jerkins and black visors, armed with sword-sticks, enter the ring; Judge introduces them to audience with the aid of a flag.) Corporal JONES, of the Wessex Yeomanry; Sergeant SMITH, of the Manx Mounted Infantry. (Their swords are chalked by the Assistants.) Are you ready? Left turn! Countermarch! Engage! (The Combatants wheel round and face one another, each vigorously spurring his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 5, 1890 • Various
... in conflict because they struggle together for bread and the means of sustenance is demonstrated immediately when we recall the simple facts of historical development. When, in the British Islands, the men of Wessex were fighting with the men of Sussex, far more frequently and bitterly than today the men of Germany fight with those of France, or either with those of Russia, the separate States which formed the island were struggling with one another for sustenance, ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... success, they were to divide the kingdom of England between them—Sweyn taking the Northern half, including Northumbria and the upper part of Mercia, and Olaf the Southern half, including East Anglia and the whole of Wessex. ...
— Olaf the Glorious - A Story of the Viking Age • Robert Leighton
... Godramnus. Nor has it been thought worth while to retain the original spelling AElfred, the ae diphthong having been appropriated by us to an entirely new sound; while our own pronunciation of the name slightly broadened as yet in Wessex, is correct enough. ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler
... Mercia, succeeded to the throne in 852, and in 852 or 853 called upon AEthelwulf of Wessex to aid him in subduing the North Welsh. The request was granted and the campaign proved successful, the alliance being sealed by the marriage of Burgred to AEthelswith, daughter of AEthelwulf. In 868 the Mercian king appealed to AEthelred and Alfred ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... try and get a bicycle map of this part of Wessex. He had noticed a big stationers' and book-sellers' near the beach, and he would call there ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole |
