[173c] N. Bailey’s Dictionary 1740.
[173d] The Saxon word “cæmban” meant “to comb,” whence our words “kempt” and “unkempt,” applied to a tidy, neatly trimmed, or combed, person, and the reverse; or used of other things, as Spenser, in his Faery Queen, says:
“I greatly lothe thy wordes,
Uncourteous and unkempt.”—Book III, canto x, stanza xxix.
On the other hand, more than 100 years before the days of the Huguenots, there was a Cardinal John Kemp, afterwards consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury, A.D. 1452, born at Wye, near Ashford in Kent. In the old Rhyming Chronicle “Lawëman’s Brut,” of date about A.D. 1205, we find “Kemp” used as a parallel to “Knight,” or warrior; as
“Three hundred cnihtes were also Kempes,
The faireste men that evere come here.”(“Hengist and Horsa,” Cottonian MS., Brit. Mus., “Otho,” c. xiii.)
(“Morris’s Specimens of early English,” p. 65.)
In Bedfordshire there is a village named Kempston, which, like Campton in the same county, is supposed to be derived from the Saxon “Kemp,” meaning “battle.” Taylor’s Words and Places, p. 206.
[175] One of these Marshalls began life as the owner of property, hunting in “pink,” &c., but ended his days as the clerk of a neighbouring parish. Another had a public-house and farm in another near parish; his descendant is a beneficed clergyman in the diocese of Exeter.
[176a] There were six bells in the original church. These were sold by the said churchwarden, who would appear to have been a zealous iconoclast. According to one tradition they went to Billinghay, but as the church there has only three bells, this is probably an error. Another version is that they were transferred to Tetford church; had the removal occurred in the time of the Thimblebys, this might not have been improbable, as they were patrons of that benefice; but several other churches claim this distinction, and, further, there are only three bells in that church, so that this again is doubtless a mistake.
[176b] Gervase Holles gives the following as the inscription existing in his time (circa 1640), “Hic jacet Gulielmus Brackenburg et Emmotta ejus uxor, qui quidem Gulielmus obiit 6 die Januarii, An’o D’ni 1476, quorum a’iabus p’pitietur Deus. Amen.” There are, he adds, “figures of themselves upon the stone, and ten children, all in brasse.” Harleian MS., Brit. Mus., No. 6,829, p. 177.
[177] In Magna Britannia it is stated that he held 15 manors in this county. In connection with the Paganell family it may here be noted that a daughter, Maud, of Gilbert de Gaunt, married a Norman, Ralph Fitzooth; their son William Fitzooth married the daughter of Beauchamp Paganell; from whom sprung Robert Fitz Ooth, commonly known as Robin Hood. Stukeley, Palæol Brit., vol. ii, p. 115.