Kidlington

Kidlington is a large village and civil parish in Oxfordshire, England, between the River Cherwell and the Oxford Canal, north of Oxford and south-west of Bicester. It remains officially a village despite its size. The 2011 census put the parish population at 13,723. Kidlington's toponym derives from the Old English Cudelinga tun: the tun (settlement) of the "Kidlings" (sons) of Cydel-hence. The Domesday Book in 1086 records Chedelintone. By 1214 the spelling Kedelinton appears in a Calendar of Bodleian Charters. The Church of England parish church of St Mary the Virgin dates from 1220, but there is evidence of a church on the site since 1073. St Mary's has fine medieval stained glass and a spire known as "Our Lady's Needle". It is a Grade I listed building. The tower has a ring of eight bells. Richard III Chandler of Drayton Parslow, Buckinghamshire, cast the seventh bell in 1700. Abraham I Rudhall of Gloucester cast the tenor bell in 1708 and the fifth bell in 1715. Mears and Stainbank of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry cast the treble, second, third, fourth and sixth bells in 1897, the year of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. Behind the church are archaeological remains of a three-sided moat. St Mary's Rectory is Tudor. Beside the church are almshouses built by Sir William Morton in 1671 in memory of his wife and children, whose names are inscribed above the windows. Sir William was a Royalist Commander in the Civil War and lived in nearby Hampden Manor in Mill Street. Other residents of Hampden Manor have included Sir John Vanbrugh, during the building of Blenheim Palace in Woodstock. The square tower-water closet in the front garden of Hampden Manor was built by Vanbrugh. It drains into a brook that now runs underground along Mill Street into the nearby Cherwell. Thomas Beecham formulated his pills while living in a cottage near the manor and worked for a time as a gardener for John Sydenham. The settlement listed in Domesday grew from an ancient village close to the church. It has as many 18th-century Georgian buildings as modern houses.