Michael Wood's Story of England - Season 1 (2010)

Host Michael Wood explores the history of England by looking at the evolution of the town of Kibworth and it's inhabitants. Like most places in the England, Kibworth was first recorded in 1086 in the Domesday Book. Prior to that, archeology provides the necessary information. Evidence indicates a village existed in Kibworth as far back as Roman times and even earlier. Essentially, people had lived there for thousands of years. With the departure of the Romans came the Anglo-Saxons, pagans who worshiped the natural world. Christianity was introduced in the early 7th ...

Wood's unique portrait moves on to 1066 when the Normans build a castle in Kibworth. He reveals how occupation affected the villagers from the gallows to the alehouse, and shows the medieval open fields in action in the only place where they still survive today. With the help of the residents, he charts events in the village leading to the people's involvement in the Civil War of Simon de Montfort, 6th Earl of Leicester. Intertwining the local and national narratives, this is a moving and informative picture of one local community through time.

Wood's fascinating tale reaches the catastrophic 14th century. Kibworth goes through the worst famine in European history, and then, as revealed in the astonishing village archive in Merton College Oxford, two thirds of the people die in the Black Death. Helped by today's villagers - field walking and reading the historical texts - and by the local schoolchildren digging archaeological test pits, Wood follows stories of individual lives through these times, out of which the English idea of community and the English character begin to emerge.