Thomas Hardy's Wessex Thomas Hardy's Wessex The English author Thomas Hardy set all of his major novels in the south and southwest of England. He named the area "Wessex" after the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom that existed in this part of that country prior to the unification of England by Æthelstan. Although the places that appear in his novels actually exist, in many cases he gave the place a fictional name. For example, Hardy's home town of Dorchester is called Casterbridge in his books, notably in "The Mayor of Casterbridge". In an 1895 preface to the novel "Far From the Madding Crowd" he described
Wessex their home county of Dorset and its neighbouring counties in the south and west of England. Hardy's Wessex excluded 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 with Berkshire, which is known in the novels as "North Wessex". The film "Shakespeare in Love" included a character called "Lord Wessex" – a title which did not exist in Elizabethan times. The ITV television series "Broadchurch" takes place in the Wessex area, primarily the county of