Kempsey is a village and civil parish in the Malvern Hills District in the county of Worcestershire, England.

It is bounded by the River Severn on the west, and the A38 main road runs through it and is about 3 miles (5 km) south of Worcester.

The composer Sir Edward Elgar lived in the village from 1923 to 1927, during which time he was made Master of the King's Music.

The full name means "Kemys' Eye", as the original settlement, where the church now stands, was a semi-island between the River Severn and marshland.

[1] According to 'Kempsey Collection' page 9, a piece of iron dated 1500-800 BC was dug up in the Court Meadow area, and is now in the Foregate Museum, Worcester.

[3] A Roman milestone dedicated to the Emperor Constantine the Great (AD 307 – 337) was found in about 1818 when ground was being levelled for a vegetable garden for Court House, opposite the west gate of the churchyard.

The Victoria County History entry describes this as "an inscription found some years before 1818, lying in two pieces with other stones 4 feet (1.2 m) deep in the west wall of the kitchen garden of the parsonage farm, north-west of the church.

It reads as follows:[5] Val(erio) Constantine P(io) fe(lici) invicto Aug(usto) 'Emperor Valerius Constantinus, pious, fortunate, unconquerable, Augustus.'

Pottery, brooches and a coin from the time of the Emperor Nero were found in burial cists dug out of the gravel beds north of the church.

The field team found skeletons from a cross-section of the local population including males, females and children.

In those days the Bishop's palace and Anglo-Saxon minster sent priests out to local parishes preaching and converting, because the country had reverted to paganism after the Romans left.

As other local parishes developed there was less need for this, and Kempsey church's graveyard therefore contracted to its present size.

On 2 August 1265 Henry III was brought as a prisoner to Kempsey by Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester and leader of the English barons.

King Edward I of England (visited 1276) & with Queen Marguerite (26 December 1281) The population of Kempsey fell from 600 in 1299 to only 86 in 1327.

Purton, "During the siege of Worcester in 1646, a squadron of 400 dragoons, under Colonel Betsworth, was quartered at Kempsey and on 2 July an attempt was made by the garrison to seize him there, which was unsuccessful."

John Noake speaks of a tradition then current in the parish that Cromwell "personally superintended the battering down of the old church, and flattened the nose of every statue then and there lying.

[16]Richard Moon (1814–1899) Chairman of the London and North Western Railway from June 1861 until he retired on 22 February 1891 lived in Kempsey from 1847 to 1848.

[17] In 1918 Lieutenant Robert Vaughan Gorle of Napleton (an area of Kempsey parish) won the Victoria Cross on 1 October.

[citation needed] The composer Sir Edward Elgar (1857–1934), lived in Kempsey from April 1923 to October 1927.