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| Essex |
Essex lies in eastern England and borders the north-east of London
and the North Sea.
In 1965 part of the county was incorporated into the new Greater London.
Towns include the county seat of Chelmsford.
Epping Forest lies in the county. |
| Anglo-Saxons
and Danes |
Anglo-Saxon Kings |
Once
formed the kingdom of the East Saxons,
later becoming part of the kingdom of Wessex.
The East Saxon kingdom reached from the river Thames in the south
(on the other side of which lay the kingdom of Kent) to the river
Stour in the north (which separated the kingdom from that of the East
Angles).
The
last Anglo-Saxon King Harold
II was buried at Waltham
Abbey after his defeat at the Battle of Hastings in 1066.
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| Areas of Outstanding
Natural Beauty |
Designated an AONB in 1970, Dedham
Vale protects an unspoilt and therefore rare example of a lowland
river valley and its associated landscape. It stretches along the
banks of the River
Stour on the border to Suffolk, an area made famous by the paintings
of John Constable.
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| Famous People |
The
highwayman Dick Turpin was born in
Hempstead in 1705.
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| Royal
Consorts and Heirs |
|
House of Normandy |
Queen to King Stephen the last Norman monarch to rule England,
Matilda of Boulogne died
at Hedingham Castle in 1152. They had married in 1125 and he
ascended the throne in 1135. She was buried at Faversham Abbey
in Kent where in
1154 her husband would also be buried.
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|
House of Lancaster |
Joan of Navarre
died in 1437 at Havering-atte-Bower. She was buried alongside
her husband Henry IV in Canterbury Cathedral in Kent.
She had become his second wife in 1403 and was Queen until his
death in 1413. They had no children.
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| Writers
and Poets |
The
writer and natural philosopher Margaret
Cavendish was born as Margaret Lucas in Colchester in 1623.
In 1645 she married the Marquis of Newcastle, William Cavendish later
becoming Duke and Duchess of Newcastle. Often ridiculed for her writing
style and opinions she continued to publish unperturbed and was rewarded
for her perseverance when in 1667 she became the first woman to be
invited to the Royal
Society, an event which would not be repeated for another 300
years. On her death in 1673 she was buried in Westminster
Abbey.
Margaret
Cavendish
Famous
people buried at Westminster Abbey
The
Victorian poet and priest Gerard
Manley Hopkins, was born in 1844 in Stratford (now in Greater
London).
Gerard
Manley Hopkins
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
Inversnaid (1881)
The
author of The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman
John
Fowles, was born in 1926 at Leigh-on-Sea.
John
Fowles
I
was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English,
and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they
never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous
dwarf Queen Victoria. I was sent to public school, I wasted two years
doing my national service, I went to Oxford; and there I began to
discover I was not the person I wanted to be.
The Magus
- Opening lines of novel
(1966)
The
crime writer Dorothy
L. Sayers died in Witham in 1957. One of the first women to have
graduated from Oxford University in 1915 she wrote many detective
stories featuring Lord Peter Wimsey.
Dorothy
L. Sayers
Dorothy L. Sayers Society
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