"Wessex" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was, I knew perfectly well what it was over which he was brooding. There was but one problem before the public which could challenge his powers of analysis, and that was the singular disappearance of the favorite for the Wessex Cup, and the tragic murder of its trainer. When, therefore, he suddenly announced his intention of setting out for the scene of the drama it was only what I had ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... remembrance also, the two conspiring to the same end. When the Saxon, sailing across seas, found a rude home in England, he named his new home Saxonland, and there are East and West and South Saxons; and so, Essex and Wessex and Sussex. In like manner, emigrants from various shores across the grim Atlantic kept the memory and names of that dear land from which they sailed; and by running your eyes over those earlier colonies, you shall see names—aboriginal and imported—and so learn, in an infallible way, ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... agreed that this should be so, and that, in the event of their success, they were to divide the kingdom of England between them—Sweyn taking the Northern half, including Northumbria and the upper part of Mercia, and Olaf the Southern half, including East Anglia and the whole of Wessex. ...
— Olaf the Glorious - A Story of the Viking Age • Robert Leighton
... cities of Andover, Silchester, Porchester, and Salisbury. With the taking of the town by the Saxons in 495 it became known as Wintanceastre, and here, after the final subjection of the Britons, the capital of Wessex was established. If the claim of Canterbury to be the "Mother City" of the Anglo-Saxon race be granted, few will deny to Winchester the honour of being her eldest and her fairest daughter. A royal city was this when Birinus, ...
— Winchester • Sidney Heath
... Welsh at Pen, and put them to flight as far as the Parret." "Her Kenwealh gefeaht aet Peonnum with Wealas, and hie geflymde oth Pedridan." Upon this passage Lappenberg in his "England under the Anglo-Saxon kings" remarks: "The reign of Cenwealh is important on account of the aggrandisement of Wessex. He defeated in several battles the Britons of Dyvnaint and Cernau [Devon and Cornwall] who had endeavoured to throw off the Saxon yoke, first at Wirtgeornesburh, afterwards, with more important results, at Bradenford [Bradford] ...
— A Glossary of Provincial Words & Phrases in use in Somersetshire • Wadham Pigott Williams
... temple four stories high there is a fine view, while the Flag Tower, a massive building with four turrets, and six stories high, is used as an observatory. There is a delightful retreat for the weary sightseer called the Refuge, a fine imitation of Stonehenge, and Ina's Rock, where Ina, king of Wessex, held a parliament after his battle with the king of Mercia. The picturesque ruins of Alton Castle and convent are in the grounds, also the ruins of Croxden Abbey and the charming Alton Church, which was of Norman foundation. The castle existed at the time of the Conquest, and the ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... this story for a new edition I am reminded that it was in the chapters of "Far from the Madding Crowd," as they appeared month by month in a popular magazine, that I first ventured to adopt the word "Wessex" from the pages of early English history, and give it a fictitious significance as the existing name of the district once included in that extinct kingdom. The series of novels I projected being mainly of the kind called local, ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... about eleven. The river is dirty and dismal here. One does not linger in the neighbourhood of Reading. The town itself is a famous old place, dating from the dim days of King Ethelred, when the Danes anchored their warships in the Kennet, and started from Reading to ravage all the land of Wessex; and here Ethelred and his brother Alfred fought and defeated them, Ethelred doing the praying ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... close of a winter day, Their anchors down, by London town, the Three Great Captains lay; And one was Admiral of the North from Solway Firth to Skye, And one was Lord of the Wessex coast and all the lands thereby, And one was Master of the Thames from Limehouse to Blackwall, And he was Captain of the Fleet—the bravest of ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... by the German Angles and Saxons has already been spoken of, as well as the conversion of these pagans to Christianity by the representatives of the Roman Church. The several kingdoms founded by the invaders were brought under the overlordship of the southern kingdom of Wessex[83] by Egbert, a contemporary of Charlemagne. But no sooner had the long-continued invasions of the Germans come to an end and the country been partially unified, than the Northmen (or Danes, as the English called them), who were ravaging France, ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... were great seamen, speedily found out that because the British Isles were divided into numerous small nations, there would be no concerted resistance when they came to plunder; and forthwith the people in the English kingdoms of Wessex and Mercia beheld to their dismay a number of strange, piratical craft upon the shores. The prows of the boats were shaped like dragons' heads, and round shields ran along the gunwales beside the rowers. ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... never thought of forest as clothing itself in different colors and taking on different forms in the eyes of different men; but I then discovered that even the most innocent word may don strange disguises. To Hardy forest suggested the sturdy oaks to be assaulted by the woodlanders of Wessex; and to Du Maurier it evoked the trim and tidy avenues of the national domain of France. To Black the word naturally brought to mind the low scrub of the so-called deer-forests of Scotland; and to Gosse it summoned up a view of the green-clad mountains that towered up from ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... left his home and his fair estate in Wessex; he would not stay in the rich monastery of Nutescelle, even though they had chosen him as the abbot; he had refused a bishopric at the court of King Karl. Nothing would content him but to go out into the wild woods and ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... on him as his natural ally. Both kingdoms had moreover a common interest as against the free British populations on their western marches, who were allied with each other across the sea: decisive campaigns of Carl the Great and King Egbert of Wessex coincide in point of time, and ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... importance, I have for the better assurance of those proofs set down some part of a discourse, written in the Saxon tongue, and translated into English by Master Noel, servant to Master Secretary Cecil, wherein there is described a navigation which one other made, in the time of King Alfred, King of Wessex, Anne 871, the words of which discourse were these: "He sailed right north, having always the desert land on the starboard, and on the larboard the main sea, continuing his course, until he perceived that the coast bowed ...
— Voyages in Search of the North-West Passage • Richard Hakluyt
... slaughtered multitudes of Britons and made slaves of many more. The conquerors named the parts of the country which they settled, from themselves. Each independent settlement was hostile to every other. Thus Sussex was the home of the South Saxons, Wessex of the West Saxons, Essex of the East Saxons. (See map opposite.) Finally, a band of Angles came from a little corner, south of the peninsula of Denmark, which still bears the name of Angeln. They took possession of all of eastern Britain not already appropriated. Eventually, ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... Norman knight spurred up to Henry with some communication that made him look uneasy, and Christina, laying her hand on Edgar's arm, said: "Brother, we have vaults. Thy troop outnumbers his. The people of good old Wessex are with thee! Now is thy time! Save thy country. Restore the line and laws of Alfred ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... whose ships had long been descending in annual raids on England's shores, gave the youthful monarch an abundance of more active service. For years he fought them, yet in his despite Guthrum, one of their ablest chiefs, sailed up the Severn, seized upon a wide region of the realm of Wessex, made Gloucester his capital, and ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... great favourite with the Scottish kings of that glorious dynasty which sprung from Margaret of Wessex, and had ample estates, which, when it was in good hands, enabled it to supply the manifold purposes of an ecclesiastical school, a model farm, a harbour for travellers, and a fortified castle. ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... pleasant to dream that some spot in the extensive tract whose south-western quarter is here described, may be the heath of that traditionary King of Wessex—Lear. ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... have been somewhat disturbed from its original position at the time when the Norman church was built. Anyhow, it is strange that we should be able to look on that tress of golden hair probably belonging to some young damsel of high degree, one akin, it may be, to the royal house of Wessex, who was being educated at this Saxon nunnery ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: A Short Account of Romsey Abbey • Thomas Perkins
... considerable assistance from Saxon bishops, abbots, and others; who not only communicated certain traditionary facts "viva voce", but also transmitted to him many written documents. These, therefore, must have been the early chronicles of Wessex, of Kent, and of the other provinces of the Heptarchy; which formed together the ground-work of his history. With greater honesty than most of his followers, he has given us the names of those learned persons who assisted him with this local ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown
... the care of those to whom she had given strict orders seven years past, that in and out of season it must be ever kept as it had erstwhile been. She had never entered the place since the day the young Marquis of Wessex, whom she had imprisoned for marrying secretly and without her consent, on his release came here, and, with a concentrated bitterness and hate, had told her such truths as she never had heard from man or woman since she was born. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Boniface and related through his mother to King Ina of Wessex, started for the East about 721, passed ten years in travel, and on his return followed his countrymen to mission work and to death among the heathen of Upper Germany. He went out by Southampton and Rouen, by Lucca and the Alps, to Naples and Catania, "where is Mount ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... much light upon Saxon settlements in England. Bede tells us that there were three different branches of this race. The Jutes settled in Kent and the Isle of Wight. The Saxons settled in Essex, the country of the East Saxons, Sussex, that of the South Saxons, and Wessex, of the West Saxons. The Angles settled in East Anglia. Now an examination of barrows shows that the Angles practised cremation and urn burial, which was not so common amongst the Jutes and Saxons, and the ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... later, when Charles the Great formed his empire of Franks, Germans, Saxons, and Gauls, Egbert gathered, in like manner, the various petty kingdoms of the Angles and Saxons under the one dominant realm of Wessex, and thus became a sort ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... English, while they chattered in Welsh. By him sat another Englishman, to whom the three tuneful Snowdon guides, their music-score upon their knees, sat listening approvingly, as he rolled out, with voice as of a jolly blackbird, or jollier monk of old, the good old Wessex song:— ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... had been the Wessex dialect, spoken and written at Alfred's capital, Winchester. When the French had displaced this as the language of culture, there was no longer a "king's English" or any literary standard. The sources of modern standard English are to be found in the East Midland, spoken in Lincoln, Norfolk, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... And again, "While the German princes who reigned at Paris, Toledo, Arles and Ravenna listened with reverence to the instructions of Bishops, adored the relics of martyrs, and took part eagerly in disputes touching the Nicene theology, the rulers of Wessex and Mercia were still performing savage rites in the ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... of these three traditions that Chesterton writes his poem. Whether they may be historically accurate does not much matter; there is no doubt that the Vale had something to do with the King of Wessex, and popular tradition has made the name ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... described, there are two chapters on Father Thames, and we are led through old Wessex, Warwickshire, the Broads and Fen-country, and the beautiful Lakeland. Twelve ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold |
