The title Earl of Wessex has been created twice in British history, once in the pre-Conquest Anglo-Saxon nobility of England and once in the Peerage of the United Kingdom. The region of Wessex (the "West Saxons'), in the south and southwest of England, had been one of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms (the Heptarchy), whose expansion in the tenth century created a united Kingdom of England.
Read more about Earl Of Wessex: First Creation, Second Creation (current)
Famous quotes containing the words earl of and/or earl:
“Ye Highlands and ye Lawlands.
Oh! where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl of Murray,
And hae laid him on the green.”
—Unknown. The Bonny Earl of Murray (l. 1–4)
“The nation looked upon him as a deserter, and he shrunk into insignificancy and an earldom.... He was fixed in the house of lords, that hospital of incurables, and his retreat to popularity was cut off; for the confidence of the public, when once great and once lost, is never to be regained.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)