The Kingdom of the West Saxons, also known as the Kingdom of Wessex, was an Anglo-Saxon kingdom in the south of Great Britain, from around 519 until England was unified in 927.
Wiltshire is a ceremonial county in South West England. It borders Gloucestershire to the north, Oxfordshire to the north-east, Berkshire to the east, Hampshire to the south-east, Dorset to the south, and Somerset to the west. The largest settlement is Swindon, and Trowbridge is the county town.
South West England, or the South West of England, is one of the nine official regions of England in the United Kingdom. It consists of the counties of Cornwall, Dorset, Devon, Gloucestershire, Somerset and Wiltshire. Cities and large towns in the region include Bath, Bristol, Bournemouth, Cheltenham, Exeter, Gloucester, Plymouth and Swindon. It is geographically the largest of the nine regions of England with a land area of 9,203 square miles (23,836 km2), but the third-least populous, with approximately 5.7 million residents.
The West Country is a loosely defined area within southwest England, usually taken to include the counties of Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Somerset and Bristol, with some considering it to extend to all or parts of Wiltshire, Gloucestershire and Herefordshire. The West Country has a distinctive regional English dialect and accent and is also home to the Cornish language.
Alexander George Thynn, 7th Marquess of Bath, styled Viscount Weymouth between 1946 and 1992, was an English peer and landowner, owner of the Longleat estate, who sat in the House of Lords from 1992 until 1999, and also an artist and author.
The Wessex Constitutional Convention is an all-party pressure group, in the United Kingdom, devoted to pursuing a degree of self-government for Wessex. It has the following stated aims:
- To achieve the broadest consensus on the form of self-government appropriate for Wessex.
- To campaign for the implementation of that consensus at the earliest possible opportunity.
- To oppose the continuing partition of Wessex between the 'South-West' and 'South-East' regions.
- 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.
Devizes is a constituency in Wiltshire, England, represented in the House of Commons of the UK Parliament since 2019 by Danny Kruger, a Conservative.
England is divided by a number of different regional schemes for various purposes. Since the creation of the Government Office Regions in 1994 and their adoption for statistical purposes in 1999, some historical regional schemes have become obsolete. However, many alternative regional designations also exist and continue to be widely used.
The Wessex Regiment was a Territorial Army infantry regiment of the British Army, in existence from 1967 to 1995. Initially consisting of a singular battalion, the regiment was later expanded to also have a second.
Thomas Hardy's Wessex is the fictional literary landscape created by the English author Thomas Hardy as the setting for his major novels, located in the south and southwest of England. Hardy 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 1874 novel Far from the Madding Crowd he described Wessex as "a merely realistic dream country".
The Royal Commission on the Constitution, also referred to as the Kilbrandon Commission or Kilbrandon Report, was a long-running royal commission set up by Harold Wilson's Labour government to examine the structures of the constitution of the United Kingdom and the British Islands and the government of its constituent countries, and to consider whether any changes should be made to those structures. It was started under Lord Crowther on 15 April 1969, Lord Kilbrandon took over in 1972, and it finally reported on 31 October 1973.
Wessex was a European Parliament constituency covering all of Dorset in England, plus parts of western Hampshire and southern Wiltshire. It was named after the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Wessex.
The region of South West England has, since the 2010 general election, 55 parliamentary constituencies which is made up of 15 borough constituencies and 40 county constituencies. At that election the Conservative Party held the largest number of constituencies, with 36. The Liberal Democrats had 15 and Labour had 4. At the 2015 general election the Liberal Democrats lost all of their seats, while the Conservatives gained one seat from Labour, leaving the Conservatives with 51 and Labour with 4. In the 2017 general election, the Conservatives remained, by far, the largest party with 47 seats, though losing three to Labour, who won 7, and one to the Liberal Democrats, who won 1. In the 2019 general election, the Conservatives increased their number of seats to 48 by regaining Stroud from Labour, who held their other six seats, while the Liberal Democrats retained their sole seat in Bath.
This is the results breakdown of the 2010 United Kingdom general election.
English Young Liberals is the youth and student wing of the English Liberal Democrats.
Dorset and Wilts Rugby Football Union is the governing body for rugby union in the counties of Dorset and Wiltshire, England. Dorset & Wilts RFU is a Constituent Body of the Rugby Football Union (RFU) and is responsible for the management and administration of the game within the counties of Dorset and Wiltshire of all forms and at all levels. Originally Dorset and Wiltshire had their own county teams but would start to merge into one body towards the end of the 1930s, having already played a combined match against Hampshire in 1935–36 which Dorset & Wilts won 9–6. By 1939 Dorset & Wilts agreed to become a unified rugby football union to take part in the 1940–41 County Championships but this was postponed by the outbreak of World War II. After the war Dorset & Wilts played its first official county match in 1947 and attained full county status from the RFU in 1949.
Campaign for the North was a Think Tank which seeks to address the North-South Divide and establish a Regional Government for the North of England covering the six historic counties of the region. The Campaign promoted a devo-max settlement and, in doing so, aimed to create a Northern Government with tax-raising powers and responsibility for policy areas including economic development, education, health, policing and emergency services.
The threefold division of England refers to the three different legal jurisdictions, Wessex, Mercia and the Danelaw, into which the Kingdom of England was divided, from the time of Cnut the Great (1016-1035) to the reign of King Stephen (1135-1154). These three areas each had their own separate legal system within England, inherited from the former kingdoms of Wessex and Mercia and the formerly Danish controlled territories of Northern and Eastern England.
