The English author Thomas Hardy used a fictionalized Wessex as a setting for many of his novels, adopting his friend William Barnes' term "Wessex" for their home county of Dorset and its neighboring 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 fictionalized name, such as with Berkshire, which is known in the novels as "North Wessex".