Great and Little Hampden
civil parish in Buckinghamshire, UK
Great and Little Hampden is a civil parish in Buckinghamshire, England, about three miles south-east of Princes Risborough. It incorporates the villages of Great Hampden and Little Hampden, and the hamlets of Green Hailey and Hampden Row. Great Hampden is the ancestral home of the Hobart-Hampden family, the most famous of whom was the English Civil War protagonist John Hampden.
History
The villages were first mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086, when they were jointly called Hamdena after the owners of the local manor.
By the 14th century 'Hamdena' was split into the two villages, Great Hampden at the top of one hill and Little Hampden on the next hill, with the lush arable land forming the rest of the two parishes spread out in the valley between them. It was also at about this time that Hampden House, the house belonging to the Hobart-Hampden family was rebuilt.
After the death of John Hampden, a cross was erected just above the lane that leads from Hampden House to the nearby village of Prestwood. Where the cross stands is reputed to be the spot where John Hampden stood when he first refused to pay the Ship Money tax in 1636. However the nearby village of Great Kimble also claims to be the place where he refused to pay the tax. From the cross there is a view of the Chiltern Hills.
“Great and Little Hampden” enters the record as civil parish in Buckinghamshire, UK. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Great, Little and Hampden can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 21, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q1880581. Authority coordinates are 51.706, -0.778. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1086 and 1636.
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This entry incorporates text from “Great and Little Hampden” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.