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Great and Little Kimble is a civil parish in Wycombe district, Buckinghamshire. It is located to the south of Aylesbury. In addition to the villages of Great Kimble and Little Kimble it contains the hamlets of Kimblewick and Marsh, and an area within Great Kimble is called Smokey Row. It comprises the ancient ecclesiastical parishes of Great Kimble and Little Kimble and also the medieval Manors which had the same names. The two separate parishes were amalgamated in 1885, but kept their separate churches, St Nicholas for Great Kimble and All Saints for Little Kimble. They fell within the Hundred of Stone, which was originally one of the Three Hundreds of Aylesbury, later amalgamated into Aylesbury Hundred. The parishes lie between Monks Risborough and Ellesborough and, like other parishes on the north side of the Chilterns, were strip parishes, long and narrow, including a section of the scarp and extending into the vale below. In length the combined parish extends for about from near the Bishopstone Road beyond Marsh to the far end of Pulpit Wood near the road from Great Missenden to Chequers but it is only a mile wide at the widest point. The village of Great Kimble lies about south of Aylesbury and about from Princes Risborough on the A4010 road. There is a prehistoric hillfort at the summit of Pulpit Hill in Great Kimble. During the Roman occupation of Britain there was a Roman villa at Little Kimble and a tumulus near Great Kimble church is probably a burial mound from the same period. In Norman times a motte and bailey castle was erected at Little Kimble and later developed into a moated site for a medieval dwellinghouse. The present churches of St Nicholas (Great Kimble) and All Saints (Little Kimble) date from the 13th century. It was here that John Hampden refused to pay his ship-money in 1635, one of the incidents which led to the English Civil War. ==The origin and meaning of the name Kimble== The name is first found in Anglo-Saxon times when it appeared as ''cyne belle'', which corresponds to two Anglo-Saxon words, ''cyne'' meaning 'royal' and ''belle'' which is the modern word 'bell'.〔Mawer & Stenton p.13〕 (The apparent similarity to the name Cymbeline led (probably in Victorian times) to a theory that the name was derived from his name. This has no basis in fact. Cymbeline (as Shakespeare called him), whose exact name is unknown but which was spelt by the Romans as Cunobelinus, was the leader of the tribe known as the Cassivellauni from about 4 BC to about 41 AD. His tribe occupied part of southern Britain at that time, which was about 800 years before the name first appeared, with 400 years of Roman occupation and several invasions from Europe in the intervening period).〔Lipscomb Vol.2 p.341 mentioned it as a conjecture in 1847〕 The exact reason for calling the place ''cyne belle'' is not certain. Mawer and Stenton, who published their book on the Place Names of Buckinghamshire in 1925, thought that ''belle'' could have meant a hill as well as a bell and suggested that the conspicuous hill at Kimble would have impressed itself on the minds of the first settlers and might have been called 'royal' as the largest visible hill in the locality or that it earned the epithet by reason of some royal burial or other unknown event.〔Mawer & Stenton p.13〕 The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place Names, first published in 1951, interpreted the name as "Royal bell-shaped hill" and the later Oxford Companion to Names (2002) also gives that as the meaning.〔Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-names under 'Kimble'. Oxford Dictionary of Names - Place Name Section - p.1093〕 The Cambridge Dictionary of English Place Names (2004) gives the translation "Royal Bell, the bell-shaped hill" and says that it is derived from the Old English ''cyne'' + ''belle'', probably used as a place-name, and that the reference is to the prominent Pulpit Hill crowned with its hillfort, suggesting that 'royal' referred to Great Kimble for distinction from Little Kimble.〔Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names under Kimble, Bucks〕 Not all these explanations are completely convincing and there may be more to be said.〔Mawer & Stenton (p.13) thought certainty was not possible.〕 The precise nature of the Royal Bell in the minds of the inhabitants of Kimble in the 9th century or earlier remains something of a mystery. It must be remembered that Pulpit Hill (or part of it) might then have been unwooded open grassland,〔Barker p.17〕 which would have made the shape of the hill more apparent from below and the hillfort on the summit (already a thousand years old) would in that case have been clearly visible and impressive and might well have been thought to be a royal castle. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Great and Little Kimble」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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