In The Story of England Michael Wood tells the extraordinary story of one English community over fifteen centuries, from the moment that the Roman Emperor Honorius sent his famous letter in 410 advising the English to look to their own defences to the village as it is today.
The village of Kibworth in Leicestershire lies at the very centre of England. It has a church, some pubs, the Grand Union Canal, a First World War Memorial - and many centuries of recorded history. In the thirteenth century the village was bought by William de Merton, who later founded Merton College, Oxford, with the result that documents covering 750 years of village history are lodged at the college.
Building on this unique archive, and enlisting the help of the current inhabitants of Kibworth, with a village-wide archeological dig, with the first complete DNA profile of an English village and with use of local materials like family memorabilia, the story of Kibworth is the story of England itself, a 'Who Do You Think You Are?' for the entire nation.
'Better than any historian for decades, [in In Search of England] Wood brings home not just the ways in which buildings, landscapes and written texts may be read, but the sensual beauty of encounters with them' TLS
Michael Wood was born and educated in Manchester. He was an open scholar in Modern History at Oriel College, Oxford, where he held a Bishop Fraser scholarship in Medieval History as a postgraduate. He has made a number of internationally successful tv series, including In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great, and four of his books have been UK non-fiction number one bestsellers. His highly acclaimed book of essays on early English history, In Search of England, was published by Penguin in 1999.
Chapter 1: Searching for England
Chapter 2: The Roots of a Community
Chapter 4: The Beginnings of Kibworth
Chapter 6: The Kingdom of England
Chapter 8: The Community of the Realm
Chapter 9: The Scholars of Merton
Chapter 10: The Great Famine and the Black Death
Chapter 11: Rebels and Heretics
Chapter 12: From Villeins to Yeomen
Chapter 13: The End of the Old Order
Chapter 14: The Reformation in Kibworth
Chapter 15: A Century of Revolution
Chapter 16: Agricultural and Industrial Revolution
Epilogue: The Twentieth Century