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 overwhelmed the Danes of Mercia and East Anglia, bringing all of England south of the Humber under Edward's power. In 918 Æthelflæd died and Edward took over direct control of Mercia, extinguishing what remained of its independence and ensuring that henceforth there would be only one Kingdom of the English. In 927 Edward's successor Athelstan conquered Northumbria, bringing the whole of England under one ruler for the first time. The Kingdom of Wessex had thus been transformed into the Kingdom of England. Although Wessex had now effectively been subsumed into the larger kingdom which its expansion had created, like the