History of Buckinghamshire

Also, Cunobelinus, a legendary king of the Catuvellauni (an ancient British tribe) is said to have had a stronghold in the area (and to have inspired the name of a group of villages known as the Kimbles).

Many ancient hunts became the king's property (worthy of note are Bernwood Forest, Whaddon Chase and Princes Risborough) as did all the wild swans of England.

Another flush of annexations of local manors to the Crown accompanied the Dissolution of the Monasteries (1536), when almost a third of the county became the personal property of King Henry VIII.

Henry VIII was also responsible for making Aylesbury the official county town over Buckingham, which he is alleged to have done in order to curry favour with Thomas Boleyn so that he could marry his daughter Anne.

Some villages to the west of the county (Brill and Boarstall for example) were under constant conflict for the duration of the war, given their equidistance between Parliamentarian Aylesbury and Royalist Oxford.

In the north of the county, Stony Stratford was Royalist and Newport Pagnell was Parliamentarian: the line of control between the sides echoed the Danegeld 700 years earlier.

Wolverton in the north (now part of Milton Keynes) became a national centre for railway carriage construction, and furniture and paper industries took hold in the south.

In the early to mid Victorian era a major cholera epidemic and agricultural famine took their hold on the farming industry which for so many years had been the stable mainstay for the county.

Migration from the county to nearby cities and abroad was at its height at this time, and certain landowners took advantage of the cheaper land on offer that was left behind.