Place:Marsh Gibbon, Buckinghamshire, England

source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

source: Family History Library Catalog

--the text in this section is a condensation of an article in Wikipedia

Marsh Gibbon is a village and civil parish in Aylesbury Vale district in Buckinghamshire, England. It is close to the A41 and about 4 miles (6.4 km) east of Bicester in Oxfordshire.

The village name comes from the English word 'marsh', describing the typical state of land in the area due to the high water table of the Aylesbury Vale. The affix 'Gibbon' derives from the family name 'Gibwen', the lords of the manor here in the twelfth century. In manorial rolls of 1292 the village was recorded as Mersh Gibwyne, though earlier (in 1086) it was known simply as Merse.

One of the two entries in the Domesday Book for the village is unique in having the only comment of any kind, namely "Graviter et miserabiliter". In translation the complete entry reads:

Ailric held it in King Edward's time but now holds in farm of William, heavily and miserably.

Ailric's manor, now named Westbury Manor, was given by King Edward IV to the Company of Cooks in London, though it has since been sold into private hands.

The second manor was the property of the abbey of Grestein in Normandy, France. However in 1365 this was seized by the Crown because it belonged to a foreign church. In 1437 it was granted to an almshouse trust founded at Ewelme in Oxfordshire. In 1617 James I granted the Mastership of the Ewelme Trust to the Regius Professor of Medicine at the University of Oxford in whose hands it remains today. Its manor house is Elizabethan and situated just south of the thirteenth century church and about 200 metres from Westbury Manor to the West.

During the English Civil War in 1645, the parliamentarian troops were garrisoned in Marsh Gibbon, following a skirmish at Hillesden. From there they marched on to Boarstal on the way to Oxford, the King's headquarters during the later part of the war. The groundworks of their encampment were visible in the field to northwest of the Ewelme manor house but were flattened in the late 1950s.

To the east of the village is the hamlet of Little Marsh and to the south east is the hamlet of Summerstown.

The parish church of Marsh Gibbon is dedicated to St Mary the Virgin. Robert Clavering, who later became the Bishop of Peterborough, was the rector from 1719.

For more information, see the EN Wikipedia article Marsh Gibbon.

The Victoria County History article on Marsh Gibbon confirms that there was a Westbury Manor both in Westbury Parish and at Marsh Gibbon.

Research Tips

Maps

• The page, Buckingham Rural District, includes a map of the parishes in the district.
• An outline map of the current civil parishes of Buckinghamshire (post 1974 and omitting Milton Keynes unitary authority) is provided by the Boundaries Commission.
• Another map which gives no source, appears to have been drawn to show the county in the late 19th century and labels the parishes directly. However, the map does not show towns and villages (unless they are parishes using the same name) and some parishes have been found to be missing from this map.
• A map provided by the Open University (a British university based in Milton Keynes) gives the locations of the old civil parishes and the new communities that make up Milton Keynes. It can be expanded to read the labels.

Registration Offices

Birth, marriage and death certificates can now be ordered online from Buckinghamshire County Council. The full postal address is Buckinghamshire Register Office, County Hall, Walton Street, Aylesbury, HP20 1YU.

The Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies (County Hall, Walton Street, Aylesbury, HP20 1UU) holds

• Church of England and Nonconformist churches including registers of baptism, marriage and burial.
• Around 35,000 wills proved by the Archdeaconry of Buckingham.
• County and District Councils (lists of councillors, minutes of meetings, etc).
• Quarter and Petty Session courts.
• Landed estates of families including the Aubrey-Fletchers, Hampdens, Carringtons and Fremantles.
• Historic maps including OS, tithe and inclosure maps
• A wide range of local history books, some for loan.
• Pamphlets and articles of local history interest.
• Local newspapers
• Computers for access to family history resources like Ancestry and FreeBMD.
• Published material is listed in the Library Catalogue.
• Catalogues to some of our manuscript material is available through Access to Archives, part of The National Archives (TNA). Their database contains catalogues describing archives held locally in England and Wales and dating from the eighth century to the present day.

In Buckinghamshire, as with other counties in England and Wales, the location of offices where Births, Marriages and Deaths were registered has altered with other changes in local government. A list of the location of Registration Offices since civil registration began in 1837 has been prepared by GENUKI (Genealogy: United Kingdom and Ireland). The table also gives details of when each Registration Office was in existence. In the case of Buckinghamshire, the same registration offices were used for the censuses since 1851. Buckinghamshire now only has a central registration office at County Hall in Aylesbury, but there are facilities for registering births, marriages and deaths in specific libraries around the county.

Nineteenth Century Local Administration

English Jurisdictions is a webpage provided by FamilySearch which analyses every ecclesiastical parish in England at the year 1851. It provides, with the aid of outline maps, the date at which parish records and bishops transcripts begin, non-conformist denominations with a chapel within the parish, the names of the jurisdictions in charge: county, civil registration district, probate court, diocese, rural deanery, poor law union, hundred, church province; and links to FamilySearch historical records, FamilySearch Catalog and the FamilySearch Wiki. Two limitations: only England, and at the year 1851.

During the 19th century two bodies, the Poor Law Union and the Sanitary District, had responsibility for governmental functions at a level immediately above that covered by the civil parish. In 1894 these were replace by Rural and Urban Districts. These were elected bodies, responsible for setting local property assessments and taxes as well as for carrying out their specified duties. Thses districts continued in operation until 1974. Urban districts for larger municipalities were called "Municipal Boroughs" and had additional powers and obligations.

Poor Law Unions, established nationally in 1834, combined parishes together for the purpose of providing relief for the needy who had no family support. This led to the building of '"union poorhouses" or "workhouses" funded by all the parishes in the union. The geographical boundaries established for the individual Poor Law Unions were employed again when Registration Districts were formed three years later. In 1875 Sanitary Districts were formed to provide services such as clean water supply, sewage systems, street cleaning, and the clearance of slum housing. These also tended to follow the same geographical boundaries, although there were local alterations caused by changes in population distribution.

Online Historical References

• The Buckinghamshire section of The Victoria History of the Counties of England, in four volumes, is online and provides an extensive history of the county, parish by parish, up to the end of the 19th century. Parishes are arranged in their original "hundreds", a fairly archaic scheme of dividing counties into reasonably sized sections.

• GENUKI for Buckinghamshire provides a lot of material on the county history from a variety of aspects. The maps of the hundreds are reproduced from 19th century publications and show the topology as well as the locations of the various parishes. There is also a schematic map covering the whole county. GENUKI does not contain much information about the 20th century and beyond.

• Local History Online provides a list of local historical organizations. Each of these societies and organizations has its own website.

• The FamilySearch Wiki on Buckinghamshire explains the jurisdictions relating to civil affairs, parishes and probate (wills and testaments) for each parish in the county and also outlines when these jurisdictions were in existence. The data does not cover the post-1974 period.