To start with I feel it is necessary to define devolution. Wikipedia describes it thus, "Devolution or home rule is the statutory granting of powers from the central government of a state to government at national, regional or local level. It differs from federalism in that the powers devolved may be temporary and ultimately reside in central government, thus the state remains, de jure, unitary." Devolution is not the same as independence, it is the redistribution of power within a country. There are some within the Wessex movement who believe that Wessex is a seperate nation from England however.
Wessex is a name that has many references and means different things to different people. To some it is the land immortalised by Thomas Hardy, to others it is the ancient Saxon kingdom of Alfred the Great. Others still will view it as a combination of those things and into this category falls the Wessex movement. This is comprised of the Wessex Regionalists, the Wessex Society and the Wessex Constitutional Convention. They believe that there is real interest in the creation of a political Wessex region, which they say will be built on the existing cultural region of that name. The trouble is does their interpretation of where Wessex is and public support for it match the existing facts? I believe there are glaring flaws with the present concept of the Wessex Region. Firstly we have the issue of democracy.
No proper opinion poll has been conducted to prove that such a devolved region in its proposed form would enjoy popular support. All the evidence points to the contrary. The former chairman of the Wessex Society, Nick Xylas, has told me that conducting an opinion poll is too expensive and he holds that the existence of large numbers of businesses with the name "Wessex" is evidence enough of public support for the Wessex movement (see the Wessex Constitutional Convention website). That is an opinion that is fairly prevalent in the Wessex movement it seems. Anyway, the obvious question is if 500 businesses choose to call themselves Wessex as a show of support, then why did the
Wessex Regionalists manage only 83 votes, or 0.17 %, of the popular vote in Dorset South in the 2005 General Elections? Or a mere 66 votes (0.1 % of the total) in Winchester in 2001? Why only nine signatures in an on-line petition calling for a Wessex region? The usage of business names as evidence is flawed. It only proves that the name 'Wessex' is a popular and convenient name with many businesses in central southern England, which is about as surprising as finding 'Viking' and 'Jorvik' as business names in Yorkshire or 'Glevum' and 'Aquae Sulis' in Gloucester and Bath respectively. Do people in those places wish for the return of the Danelaw or the Roman Empire? One member/supporter made this comment in relation to Devonians wanting to be seperate from the Wessex region."I would propose an assembly for Cornwall, a Parliament for Wessex (Wiltshire, Somerset, Dorset, Hampshire and Gloucestershire) and a referendum for Devon; the choices of which would be: A) To be a full part of the Wessex Parliament. B) To have extra individual powers whilst remaining part of the Wessex Parliament. Or C) To opt out of regional assembly altogether and to take orders from London".
So much for democracy then. This is especially ironic when one considers the following statement by the Wessex Constitutional Convention, as seen on their Website.
"To promote as Wessex the area comprising the eight traditional counties of Berkshire, Devon, Dorset, Hampshire, Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, Somerset and Wiltshire, subject to addition or subtraction according to popular wish."
Note "popular wish". The majority of Devonians who have taken an interest in the devolution topic (a majority of about 100% in fact) have rejected the Wessex region, so there is your "popular wish". The other problem in terms of identity, and again one which has been happily ignored, is that the South West Regional Assembly is considered by the majority of people to be too large. If you look at the Wessex region you can see that they are virtually the same in appearance.
Wessex region
South West Regional Assembly 
Why on Earth the Wessex movement thought that moving the SWRA one county to the right would suit anyone other than the Cornish is anyone's guess. The Wessex region covers 10,926 square miles and a population of about 7.5 million people. One member of the Wessex movement has even suggested the inclusion of Herefordshire, Surrey, East Sussex and West Sussex into the region and putting Devon into a 'Devonwall' region with Cornwall. The population of this region would be about 10 million and it would cover 11,288 square miles, almost the size of Belgium (11,750 sq. mi.). The SWRA covers 8981 square miles and has a population of about 5 million. The intention is for the Wessex region to have a parliament with powers equivilent to those of Scotland. What will happen if the Government refuses to give them such powers is not discussed. Would they settle for the same, comparatively weak, powers of the SWRA?
There is no 'distinct culture' or dialect (see the Wessex Constitutional Convention and Wessex Society websites). The evidence that I have found on the Wessex Society's website shows that their concept of an overall Wessex dialect is based on Peter Trudgill's The Dialects of England and the dialect writings of Thomas Hardy. If one actually takes a look at the dialect maps used in Mr. Trudgill's book, then the following information can be gleaned. There are two maps that show the regional dialects of England in the book. The first map represents the traditional English accents and shows a single dialect region extending from Cornwall to Kent and parts of South Wales. That just means that prior to the spread of Estuary English people in that region had related accents with a rolled final r as in "tractorr" or "farmerr". No distinct Wessex dialect there then. The second map shows the modern dialect regions and south western English extends from Cornwall all the way up into Herefordshire, Shropshire and parts of Worcestershire and Northamptonshire. Again, all that shows is that a large chunk of southern and middle England has related dialects. Trudgill's maps show that any Wessex dialect is just part of a larger whole and is in no way distinct from surrounding counties.
The Wessex Society also give a link to a section of The Thomas Hardy Associations resources page, which contains the line, "In many respects the Dorset vernacular cannot be differentiated from the Somerset dialect, while, on the other hand, it has considerable likeness to Devon folk speech". Further investigation of that webpage's parent directory produces the following link to it: Dorset Dialect compiled by Rosemarie Morgan from Wilkinson Sherren, with glossary. This means two things; a) the Wessex Society's Wessex dialect is based on Hardy's writings rather than any real research and b) it is in fact late 19th century Dorset dialect, unsurprising as Hardy was Dorset born and bred.
Wessex and virtually interest in Wessex as a defined region was as dead as a doornail for nearly a thousand years until Hardy took the name and used it in his novels. Wessex as it is today is an entirely modern creation. It probably only really existed as a distant folk memory in Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire, coming to light again in academic circles in John Speed's Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine of 1612, the map that formed the basis of Hardy's Wessex. This was the first map ever drawn up of Wessex and included Devon in it for the first time. Hardy's Wessex was Dorset with a few added bits of other counties for good measure. If you look at a map of Hardy's Wessex, you can see that most of the places in his novels are in Dorset, with a scattering from Cornwall to Berkshire. but who thinks of Berkshire as Hardy's Wessex? Dorset is Hardy's Wessex. Hardy was a landscape writer and he borrowed other bits of landscape to modify it in literary form. In that sense the kingdom of Wessex was shrunk down to the size of a county in the manner of Essex, Middlesex and Sussex. Far from the Madding Crowd is Hardy's first novel in which he mentions Wessex. In his preface he says the following (the abridging and italics are mine)."It was in the chapters of Far from the Madding Crowd.... 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.... Finding that the area of a single county did not afford a canvas large enough, and that there were objections to an invented one, I disinterred the old one. Since then.... The dream-country has, by degrees, solidified into a utilitarian region....but I ask all good and idealistic readers to forget this, and to refuse steadfastly to believe that there are any inhabitants of a Victorian Wessex outside these volumes."
That bears out my hypothesis that Thomas Hardy invented modern Wessex. There is no unbroken link extending back to Alfred, except in a generic English one.
What makes Wessex any different from 'Mercian culture' or 'East Anglian culture'? In real terms the difference is so small as to be impossible to define. A thousand years of history and demographic change have erased any sense of an actual Wessex region covering the same area as what the Wessex movement proposes. The area that Wessex actually covers in popular belief is probably Wiltshire, Dorset, western Hampshire and eastern Somerset. Their insistence that the rolled West Country 'r' is a feature of Wessex speech was probably true a couple of generations ago, but how many people in Oxfordshire and Berkshire speak like that now? Trudgill noted nearly twenty years ago that south western speech was limited to the elderly in Berkshire, with younger people speaking Estuary English. People there do not recognize themselves as being in Wessex and especially not in the same region as counties like Somerset and Devon. Perhaps they will have to learn to talk like Pam Ayres and drink cider if we have a Wessex Region; I think not! What about Cornwall? Hardy based some of his writings in Cornish locations, Cornwall was conquered by the historical Wessex in 838 AD, Wessex Trains (one of those Wessex named businesses and oft-mentioned by the Wessex movement) serves Cornwall and they speak with a rolled 'r', so why aren't they included? Answer, because there is a strong Celtic identity in Cornwall and the Wessex movement are steering clear of it for now, although Lord Bath and others want it in their Wessex region if possible. This is the reason why members of the Wessex Society are obsessively trying to stop growing interest in Devon in relation to that county's Celtic past. If Devon were to ever 'go Celtic' then the Wessex movement would have to drop it from their region. No matter what ones opinion on
Celtic Devon its proponents at least don't view themselves as Celts or Devon as a Celtic nation and the Wessex movement's attempts to suppress feelings of Celticness in Devon seem somewhat sinister. Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire are included in the so-called Wessex region despite never really being part of Wessex. The chief reason for including Gloucestershire is that Mr. Xylas is from there and considers himself a "West Saxon" rather than a "Mercian". It is also worth noting that on the Wessex Society's website they mention making up culture and identity in the manner of the 19th century romantics in Ireland and Scotland. To quote their site "Contemporary Celtic regional identities are almost entirely the product of romantic visionaries such as Sir Walter Scott in Scotland and the Gaelic League in Ireland. There you are; anybody can invent a national culture! That seems to the intention of the Wessex movement due to the lack of any definite Wessex culture. The difference is that Ireland, Wales and Scotland already existed and had their own identities, laws, institutions and culture before the Romantic Movement; compared to that Wessex is just a vague region that Hardy wrote about and was a kingdom well before living memory.
The usage of the term 'West Saxon' to describe themselves and the inhabitants of the Wessex region, is an anachronism as West Saxons ceased to exist as a separate people after the unification of England in the 10th century whence they became part of a unified English nation and have been ever since. Likewise the people of Essex, Sussex and Middlesex are no longer called East, South and Middle Saxons; the land was named after the people, not vice versa. There are also racial connotations in the word, which have no place in 21st century Britain; how can someone be a West Saxon if their ancestors are from Jamaica? Automatic second class citizenship, thats what. The entire Wessex movement (although the Wessex Regionalists don't yet recognize Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire as Wessex) seems to think of itself in pre-Norman, Anglo-Saxon terms like the way that they refer to the eight traditional counties of Wessex; Devon, Dorset, Hampshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire, Somerset, Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire. Notice anything missing from their map? Bristol and the Isle of Wight. If this region was created, one assumes that these two counties would be amalgamated into Gloucestershire and Hampshire. But why are they not traditional? Bristol became a county in 1373 (apart from a brief period in Avon from 1974 -96) and the Isle of Wight apart from being geographically separate from Hampshire became a county in 1890. The answer must be that both are post-1066 counties and are therefore not Anglo-Saxon and traditional. Take the Wyvern Universe, the proposed Wessex mythology, the sub-heading is Tolkien & the Denormanisation of Wessex. Post-Conquest England is therefore in need of reform and we should turn the clock back nearly a millennium to the 11th century. What about all the Norman cathedrals and castles which make up so much of our beatiful landscape? What about villages with partially Norman names like Hatch Beauchamp or Curry Rivel? The trouble I feel is that the whole idea of a Wessex region has been taken up by a load of people trying to jump on the Celtic nationalism bandwaggon, transposing a Celtic nation with a Saxon one. To do this they've thrown in a load of nonsense, aping the processes and thinking in Wales, Scotland and Cornwall. The whole Wessex region concept is like the last gasp of the 19th century Romantic Movement, a fantasy realm dreamed up in some Victorian gentlemen's club over brandy and cigars. Wonderfully English in an old fashioned sort of way. One gets the idea however that if ever a region were to ever come into being, we'd have a parliament full of people dressed in Anglo-Saxon clothing, conducting debates in Old English and concerned chiefly with promoting the image that they were ruling a Saxon nation. I am also worried that there could be active attempts to suppress any pre or post-Saxon culture, traditional or revived and the possible re-writing of history. It is possibly unfair of me to say that that last remark, but I still have grave doubts.
The economic imbalance between the eastern and western halves of the Wessex region.
GDP or Gross Domestic Product is a way of measuring economic performance.
The UK GDP Index has an average value of 100, so any county scoring less than that is below average. The western three counties are much poorer than the eastern counties.
