Great and Little Kimble - The Origin and Meaning of The Name Kimble

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'.

(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).

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.

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.

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.

Not all these explanations are completely convincing and there may be more to be said. 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, 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.