Thomas Hardy's Wessex as an artistic conceit, and has spawned a lucrative tourist trade, and even a devolutionist Wessex Regionalist Party. Outer Wessex is sometimes referred to as Nether Wessex. The abbreviations for Thomas Hardy's novels that are used in the table are as follows: Artists such as Walter Tyndale, Edmund Hort New, Charles George Harper and others, have painted or drawn the landscapes, places and buildings described in Hardy's novels. Their work was used to illustrate books exploring the real-life countryside on which the fictional county of Wessex was based: Thomas Hardy's Wessex The English author Thomas Hardy set all of his
Wessex he established earldoms based on the former kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia and East Anglia, but initially administered Wessex personally. Within a few years, however, he had created an earldom of Wessex, encompassing all of England south of the Thames, for his English henchman Godwin. For almost fifty years the vastly wealthy holders of this earldom, first Godwin and then his son Harold, were the most powerful men in English politics after the king. Finally, on the death of Edward the Confessor in 1066, Harold became king, reuniting the earldom of Wessex with the crown. No new earl was appointed before