Uriah the Hittite his feet," meaning to spend time at home and attend to his wife. Uriah refused, claiming a code of honor with his fellow warriors while they were in battle. It was common for warriors in preparation for battle to abstain from sex, as a practice of discipline. After Uriah repeatedly refused to see his wife Bathsheba, David sent him to his commanding officer Joab with a letter that ordered Joab to put Uriah on the front lines of the battle and have the other soldiers move away from him so that he would be killed by enemy soldiers. Despite Uriah's
Far from the Madding Crowd an extreme plot ... he is out to subvert his readers' complacency". "Far from the Madding Crowd" offers in ample measure the details of English rural life that Hardy so relished. Hardy first employed the term "Wessex" in "Far from the Madding Crowd" to describe the "partly real, partly dream-country" that unifies his novels of South West England. He found the word in the pages of early English history as a designation for an extinct, pre-Norman conquest kingdom, the Wessex from which Alfred the Great established England. In the first edition, the word "Wessex" is used only once, in chapter