essex is the name of the former kingdom which originated in south-central England and expanded to cover the whole of the south west. The theory that Wessex originated with the landing of Cerdic in Southampton Water in 495AD with the kingdom expanding from south to north as stated in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has now largely been refuted based on the evidence from archaeology and historical sources, supported by research by academics such as John Blair and Barbara Yorke. Hampshire was a Jutish province, not Anglo-Saxon, and place-name studies show this to be the case. Wessex had no cohesive origin but seems to have comprised several kin groups, possibly mercenaries, who finally became territorially established and identifiable to history in the region around Dorchester-on-Thames in Oxfordshire by the mid 6th century. Their initial area of influence was in the Upper Thames/Cotswold area, (Oxfordshire, and parts of Gloucestershire and Berkshire) only later pushing southwards and westwards. Initially they were known as the Gewisse, a nickname meaning “The Trusties” and they may have been no more than a strong gang of mercenaries who took over the lands of a weaker peoples. As such they need not have been related and certainly not royal. This might explain why there are several supposed “royal” kin-groups in later history. The reputed genealogy of the Gewissan royal kin-group, has kings whose names are mostly of clear of Celtic origin. Cerdic (the first king of Wessex, whose life was fictionalised by Alfred Duggan in his novel The Conscience Of The King) is an anglicised form of Caradoc, and the names Cynric, Centwine, Caedwalla, are all Celtic. If these were not actually Britons, there had clearly been significant levels of inter-marriage.

In the 570s the Gewisse expanded their territory, moving in to Buckinghamshire, Bedforshire and, following the battle of Dyrham in 577, the whole of Gloucestershire and the area around Bath. However, the Mercians, an Anglian dominated tribe to the north, started to encroach onto this territory. To counter this threat, a strategic alliance, clearly under Northumbrian domination, was forged to jointly operate against Mercian aggression. This may explain why Cynegils received baptism in 635 under the sponsorship of Oswald of Northumbria, and married his daughter. The success of this alliance was short-lived and by 645 Mercia had pushed the Gewisse out of Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, and large parts of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. Having failed to hold on to land to the north, the Gewisse, who by now were starting to be called the West Saxons, turned southwards and westwards taking control of Wiltshire, Somerset and northern Hampshire following the battles of Bradford-on-Avon in 652 and Penselwood in 658. By 688 the Jutish provinces in southern Hampshire along with Dorset and east Devon had been added to Wessex and the capital moved from Dorchester-on-Thames to Winchester.

In the 9th Century, Wessex rose to become the dominant power in a newly-united England, which led to its distinctive identity being subsumed into the larger kingdom. However, when Canute became king in 1016, he revived the names of the former English kingdoms and applied them to the newly-created office of Earl. Canute originally kept the Earldom of Wessex for himself, but later awarded it to Godwin, who became the most powerful private citizen in England as a result. He was succeeded by his son, Harold Godwinson, later to become king Harold II of England. When the Normans invaded in 1066, one of their first acts was to abolish the Earldoms in favour of the more manageable shires as the largest units of sub-national govenment, fearful of the threat that powerful regional government posed to their centralising authority. The office of Earl of Wessex remained dormant until our own time, when Prince Edward became the 3rd Earl upon the occasion of his marriage to Sophie Rhys -Jones.

Kingdoms in Anglo-Saxon England had no fixed boundaries - they merely denoted folk who were loyal to a king. For example, W. G. Hoskins in his book Devon says that in the 8th and 9th century, the Saxon population of Devon obeyed the laws of, and paid taxes to, the kings of Wessex while their British neighbours were subject to the kings of Dumnonia. The extent of Wessex fluctuated wildly during the period of its existence, making it hard to give an exact definition. The Encyclopaedia Britannica lists Hampshire, Wiltshire, Somerset and Dorset as the "permanent nucleus" of Wessex. The map of the Saxon Heptarchy by the Tudor cartographer John Speed also included Berkshire and Devon within Wessex, and this map was later used by Thomas Hardy as the basis for his literary Wessex, and later still by the Wessex Regionalists as the region to be administered by their proposed Wessex parliament. More recently, though, an expanded definition which also includes Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire has been gaining in popularity, perhaps due to the important archaeological finds around Dorchester-on-Thames.

By 1066, Harold Godwinson's earldom of Wessex had expanded to include all the above counties, plus Cornwall, Sussex and his original territory of Herefordshire. This posed Wessex Society something of a problem when it came to deciding what exactly we meant by "Wessex". Did we use the Britannica's definition, Hardy's, Harold's or something in between? Peter Trudgill's book The Dialects of England offered a partial solution. It showed a map of the areas where Wessex dialect was spoken. This included all of Harold's earldom apart from Sussex (which fell in the South-East dialect region); plus parts of Shropshire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire. We decided not to include these latter three counties as, dialect aside, they had never been part of either the kingdom or the earldom of Wessex. We also excluded Cornwall as, whilst it came under the dominion of Wessex after the battle of Hingston Down in 838 AD, there are a number of interesting differences to other South-Western counties.  For example, neighbouring Devonshire was included in the shiring system pioneered in Wessex, whereas Cornwall was not only excluded, but subdivided into shires of its own.  This points to a sub-kingdom with a high degree of autonomy, which manifests itself to this day in a feeling of separation from England (older people in Cornwall still talk of "going to England" when they cross the Tamar). As recently as 1858, Sir George Harrison, Attorney General to the Duchy of Cornwall, described the county as "a Palatine state, extraterritorial to the English Crown".

This left the nine Ancient or Geographic Counties of Devon, Dorset, Hampshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire, Somerset, Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire. Our AGM in October 2002 dropped Herefordshire from the core list (leaving the area coloured red on the map above), in order to bring our definition into line with that presented in The Case For Wessex, a response to the White Paper on regional governance jointly prepared by Wessex Society, the Wessex Regionalists and the Wessex Constitutional Convention. These counties have all been part of Wessex at one time or another; they all speak the South-Western dialect of English; they are all cider counties apart from Oxfordshire; they are all rural and agricultural in character; and they are all made up of small to medium-sized market towns, with the only major cities being ports, and therefore on the periphery. While a case for a smaller, or indeed a larger Wessex can be made, we feel that a number of conterminous counties sharing so many features in common is as good a definition of a cultural region as any, and certainly better than the so-called "standard regions", which split Wessex between unimaginative South-West and South-East regions and which treat Cornwall as just another English county.