Wessex

It's mad for Wales.

Not that I don't want to stop them from going, because I'm a Wessex nationalist, and I want to get rid of East Anglia and Northumbria and the Cornish.

They can go.

I just want Wessex.

So I'm not going to counter-signal them too much, but it is mad for them.

As a Wessex man, I totally appreciate it.

But anyway, you get every... absolute shitheel who hates Britain coming out in favour, right? Congressman Randy Fine, right? From the river to the sea, Scotland, Wales and Ireland will be

free.

More invasions.

About 1500 B.C., The situation became further complicated by the arrival of a new people in the region of southern England, anciently called Wessex.

The traces suggest the Brittany coast of France as a source, and the people seem at first to have been a small but heroic group of aristocrats.

Their heroes are buried with wealth and ceremony, surrounded by their axes and daggers of bronze, their gold ornaments, and amber and jet beads.

We cannot, of course, describe the details of the religious ceremonies which must have been staged in Stonehenge, but we can certainly imagine the well-integrated and smoothly working culture which must have been necessary before such a great monument could have been built.

This England, the range from 1900 to about 1400 BC, includes the time of development of the archaeological features usually called the Early Bronze Age in Britain.

In fact, traces of the Wessex warriors persisted down to about 1200 BC.

The main regions of the island were populated, and the adjustments to the highland and lowland zones were distinct and well-marked.

Read for Liberbox.org by John Burlinson.

Wessex Heights, 1896.

There are some heights in Wessex, shaped as if by a kindly hand, for thinking, dreaming, dying on, and at crises when I stand, say, on Ingpen Beacon eastward, or on Will's Neck westwardly, I seem where I was before my birth, and after death may be.

in the lowlands i have no comrade not even the lone man's friend her who suffereth long and is kind accepts what he is too weak to mend down there they are dubious and askance there nobody thinks his eye but mine chains do not clank where one's next neighbour is the sky in the towns i am tracked by phantoms having weird detective ways shadows of beings who fellowed with myself of earlier days they hang about at places and they say harsh heavy things men with a frigid sneer and women with tart disparagings down there i seem to be false to myself my simple self that was and is not now and i see him watching wondering what crass cause can have merged him into such a strange continuator as this who yet has something in common with himself my chrysalis I cannot go to the great grey plain.

There's a figure against the moon.

In Russia they first organized a kingdom.

In England they by their pressure first consolidated the kingdom of Wessex, then conquered it under Canute and William I.

In the West Frankish country they finally put an end to the long struggle for supremacy, sounded the death knell of the Carolings of Laon.

and aided to form modern France.

In England the Danish inroads, beginning about the year 787, had assumed their second phase about the year 855, and destroyed the nascent unity of the kingdom then partially attained by Egbert, king of the West Saxons.

The Danes had easily occupied the more northern kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia, and East Anglia, peopled as they were by the Angles, a race more nearly akin to their own than the Saxons, and disorganized by the late struggles for supremacy.

But as they drew near to the more thoroughly organized kingdom of Wessex, the opposition became more resolute and the struggle more severe.

Led by their great hero Alfred, the Saxons maintained the struggle for seven years until the Peace of Wedmore, 878, obtained for Wessex a respite from her harassing foe.

I think that turned into a

Wessex accent,

didn't it? Sorry.

She was as good as a mother to her sisters and brother, but there never were such good children.

And that part of Dorset, which is apart from where the sea is, is pretty much the most beautiful place.

I think it's really unspoiled and gorgeous and little hills and villages and old churches, little pubs, proper, proper, lovely old Wessex.

But I've got a snatch of time and I just thought I would actually carry on with the chapter and from the Pickwick Club, the Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens.

Now, if you remember, we had an old gentleman reciting, with the aid of sundry promptings from his wife, something called The Ivy Green, and it was a three-stanza poem or song all about the, in dedication to the ivy, finishing with, Creeping on where time has been, A rare old plant is the ivy green.