About Us

The Community Assembly of Somerset is located in a ceremonial county in the South West Region and was once known as Somersetshire. Somerset is a rural county of rolling hills, the Blackdown Hills, Mendip Hills, Quantock Hills and Exmoor National Park, and large flat expanses of land including the Somerset Levels. There is evidence of human occupation from Palaeolithic (Old Stone Age) times, and of subsequent settlement by the Celts, Romans and Anglo-Saxons. The county played a significant part in Alfred the Great's rise to power, and later the English Civil War and the Monmouth Rebellion (1685). Somerset's name derives from Old English Sumorsǣte, short for Sumortūnsǣte, meaning "the people living at or dependent on Sumortūn (Somerton a market town in Somerset)". The first known use of Somersæte is in the law code of King Ine who was the Saxon King of Wessex from 688 to 726 CE, making Somerset along with Hampshire, Wiltshire and Dorset one of the oldest extant units of local government in the world. An alternative suggestion is the name derives from Seo-mere-saetan meaning 'settlers by the sea lakes”' The Roman invasion of Somerset was part of the ongoing expansion of the Roman presence in Britain and was carried out on the orders of the future emperor Vespasian. The Second Legion Augusta invaded Somerset from the south-east in 47 CE. The county remained part of the Roman Empire until around 409 CE, when the Roman occupation of Britain came to an end.