Robert Fripp: 12 books

“The Infant and the Hare” is the first, earliest story in Fripp’s new collection, “Wessex Tales: eight thousand years in the life of an English village.” Stone Age hunters make camp on Okeford Hill. As dawn breaks the men go hunting while a woman gives birth. And the end? In an age when human beliefs were much different than ours, the end is mystical.

Friday September 15th, 1916. Just before dawn a young soldier from Okeford goes over the top, advancing into enemy machine gun fire. It's the first day of the second battle of the Somme.

Long ago, the ancient lady in the darkened bed had been the first white woman to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. Or had she been the first to walk around it? Whatever the truth, that legend from her lifetime would soon die with her. Unconscious on her deathbed, scenes from her life run through her head while caregivers chatter around her. [1976]

Turig, a Bronze Age farmer, tells his grandson how he had been drafted for labor service decades before. The work was long and dangerous but his supervisor’s flirtatious daughter presented the larger threat. Two years later, Turig helped lift the last sarsen stone onto a structure we know as Stonehenge....

The earliest known mosaic floor to depict Christ was laid in a remote Roman villa in Dorset around 325 CE. (Discovered under meadow grass in 1963 it was moved to the British Museum.) The larger end of this mosaic measures 17 feet by 15, the smaller end, 16½ feet by 8. Why lay this magnificent floor...

In the village of Child Okeford a ‘Bull’ or 'Ooser' used to show up uninvited at Christmas festivities, causing mayhem. One guest at his manor's annual ball sees an opportunity to make a good match for his daughter. He pays the Ooser to carry her off. Rescued by her otherwise timid...

Viviana de Eskelling was the last in the family line of the Norman Schelins. Her family had held Okeford for 200 years. A single woman (a woman sole) was disadvantaged in law. So around 1287 Viviana married Bartholomew Turberville, taking Okeford into the Turberville estates. (Thomas Hardy tweaked...

The Norman knight Schelin (from whom the village of Shilling Okeford or Shillingstone takes its name) was awarded the manor of Okeford for his service to King William at the Battle of Hastings. Schelin holds the richest agricultural land in Dorset, but he still has a problem. His daughter would rather...

This story in the "Wessex Tales" collection—"Julia" (Story 11)—is sequel to "The Face in the Floor" (Story 10). It was Julia’s parents who commissioned their villa's magnificent mosaic floor in the previous tale; as a child, she watched the master-mosaicist lay it. As "Julia" begins, Julia...

Eleanor of Aquitaine, medieval Europe's most astonishing woman, recalls wars, intrigues, her crusade and ruthless diplomacy while confessing her loves, her hopes for her children, and their fates. POWER OF A WOMAN is Eleanor's memoir of her marriages to two warring kings, Louis VII of France, followed...

Wessex Tales Volume 1 Six thousand years ago a trail led inland from a landing place on England's Channel coast. Turning northeast across Dorset, the track travelled on to country farmed by a community that would one day build Stonehenge. For much of its route this trail kept to the...

Wessex Tales, Volume 2 follows the first volume of Wessex Tales in presenting twenty new stories spanning the eight-thousand-year life of an English village. Travel the ages through ancient forests and along the river that shaped the valleys and hills of the Blackmore Vale. Author Thomas Hardy...