Marsh Gibbon

Marsh Gibbon is a village and civil parish in Aylesbury Vale district in Buckinghamshire, England. It is close to the A41 and the border with Oxfordshire about 4mi east of Bicester.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'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.