Wessex - Cultural and Political Identity in Modern Times

Cultural and Political Identity in Modern Times

The English author Thomas Hardy used a fictionalised Wessex as a setting for many of his novels, adopting his friend William Barnes' term Wessex for their home county of Dorset and its neighbouring counties in the south and west of England. Hardy's Wessex excluded Devon, Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire, but the city of Oxford, which he called "Christminster", was visited as part of Wessex in Jude the Obscure. He gave each of his Wessex counties a fictionalised name, such as for Berkshire, which is known in the novels as "North Wessex".

A movement exists in south-central England which aims to create a new regional cultural and political identity for Wessex. The movement consists of three distinct but interlinked organisations: the Wessex Regionalist Party, a registered political party which contests elections; the Wessex Constitutional Convention, an all-party pressure group in which those who are sympathetic to devolution for Wessex but who are not members of the Wessex Regionalist Party can be represented; and the Wessex Society, which is a cultural society devoted to promoting the distinctive identity of the region, while remaining politically neutral. The Wessex Constitutional Convention and the Wessex Regionalist Party both do not believe that Cornwall should form part of a devolved Wessex region, the boundaries which remain unclear. Because it does not take a political position regarding devolution to a strictly defined territory, the Wessex Society can afford to assume a relaxed position about where exactly the boundaries of cultural Wessex lie. The Wessex Regionalists had used Hardy's definition of Wessex for their political Wessex Region, but today the party also includes Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire. In the 2010 UK General Election, the Wessex Regionalists contested the West Oxfordshire parliamentary seat of Witney. An eight county definition of Wessex has been criticised from a number of quarters. Some people 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 much of the Anglo-Saxon period. Others would argue that such references to the Dark Ages are not relevant to a modern region defined by its geography.

The Wessex regionalist organisations justify their eight-shire definition of Wessex in terms both of modern regional geography and (less convincingly) early English history. They point to the impossibility of pleasing everyone as an argument against change to their definition of Wessex at the present time, though they do not rule out the possibility of change in the future if the popular will demands it.