It is easy to generalize, as William Blake remarked, but ‘to Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit’. Historians needless to say are not quite the same kind of animal as poets, but, inspired by Blake’s advice, this book contains a very simple particularizing idea. It tells the story of one place through the whole of English history. Alternatively, it could be said that it tries to tell the story of England through the eyes of one place. It is a narrative in which as far as possible the subject is the people, not the rulers. Of course, rulers play their part in the story, but the important action takes place not in the palaces of the rich and powerful, but in the houses and fields – and in the minds – of the ordinary people. And ordinary lives are often no less dramatic, as I hope will become apparent in the tales that follow, from the Vikings to the Somme, and from the Lollards to the Suffragettes.
The village I have chosen lies in the centre of England, and is remarkable for its ordinariness. It is not Ambridge, nor does it look like a Hovis advert; but that is what I like about Kibworth. It was not exactly chosen at random – the astonishing treasure trove of manorial documents from the village in Merton College, Oxford, had already opened up the possibility of telling real people’s lives in the medieval past, of tracing peasant family trees for a dozen generations, of hearing the voices of peasants involved in political revolution, religious radicalism and educational betterment. All that gives the would-be storyteller a fighting chance. But the truth is that such are the records of England that almost any place could have done; indeed, there are hundreds of villages where to a greater or lesser degree such records exist. Over the years I have spent much time mulling over quite a few of them: rich Anglo-Saxon charters from Hampshire, Worcestershire and Oxfordshire; the astounding manorial documents for the villages of northern Suffolk and the Northumbrian mining towns that define people’s material lives in the Middle Ages; churchwardens’ accounts from Devon hill villages that chart the inner lives of English people over the great psychological rupture of the Reformation. But the Kibworth manorial documents, on which the historian Cicely Howell had already done a fascinating study of tenure and inheritance, are particularly rich and informative, especially as they come from a place that lies on a linguistic and cultural divide in English history.
What clinched the choice though was the industrial history of Kibworth Beauchamp, the other side of the track from the Merton manor, with its framework-knitters, factories, canals and railways. Many English rural villages have fascinating documents, but their history falls away at the end of the old agricultural world with the eighteenth-century enclosures; and now many have simply become commuter villages. But with its housing estates, new schools, Indian and Chinese takeaways, on the fringe of the multiracial city of Leicester, Kibworth is emphatically England in miniature: it is where most of us live today, and even allowing for the many regional and local differences in England, its history is the story of us all.
So with the medieval history of Kibworth Harcourt and the industrial story of Kibworth Beauchamp to rely on, there was the bedrock of a narrative. But it still could not have been foreseen precisely how things would turn out, how rich one place – chosen as I have said almost at random – would turn out to be. For example, we started off with nothing before 1066 except a few archaeological finds recorded by Georgian antiquarians and Victorian local historians. Given that, the reader may feel some surprise at the length of my narrative before 1066, but the hope that intense on-the-ground scrutiny might bring results was startlingly fulfilled when in the summer of 2009 the villagers began this project with a dig across Kibworth. Some fifty-five test pits yielded evidence of prehistoric Beaker people and Romans; remarkable pottery from the early and late Anglo-Saxon period and all the way through the Middle Ages; debris from Georgian coaching inns, frame-knitters’ workshops and railway navvies’ camps; and even in one pit household throwouts from the Swinging 1960s. Even before we had taken stock of this unforeseen wealth of new evidence a magnetometry survey by our friends in the Hallaton group came up with Iron Age houses and a complete Roman villa. All of which makes me think that, as the historian William Hoskins suggested long ago, the national story can indeed be told from almost anywhere. The details of the story will be different in each place, but it is the same story: the growth of an English community in one place over time, and the interaction of the local with the national narrative.
The process of gathering material and developing the story I see as a kind of crystallization (to use a term from Stendhal) in which disparate fragments and impressions, moments in time, shards of memory, gradually come together to form a picture, but of course one only given the warmth of life by our imaginations. This idea it seems to me is particularly apposite to the task of historians. Starting with no documents and a few chance archaeological finds, imagination above all is what is needed to try to construct the beginnings of a narrative without any real sources. Then when documents come in, the process of crystallization begins as a community grows, and changes, and its relations become more complex. Finally, when the documents become richer and more revealing about people’s lives, we hear them speak for themselves rather than through texts produced for their lords.
In the speculative beginnings of this narrative, as is the case in most places in England, the clues – and the voices – are few indeed; but I have tried to be ruled by the documents where they exist. Indeed, I have not been able to resist giving plentiful detail of some of the documents from the village story: so in these pages the reader will find the survey of the village from Domesday Book in 1086, the first full account from the 1280s, medieval poll taxes, the list of Black Death victims from the village court book, important sixteenth-century wills, and many later examples of the raw data of social history, including letters from a local suffragette sent from Holloway prison.
However I have not allowed myself to stray too far into imagined events, despite what was often a great temptation to do so. It is true that we cannot prove that the peasant John Wodard was with Simon de Montfort in the army of Kent in 1264 (though the lord of Kibworth did indeed intervene on Wodard’s behalf in Kent that October). No document says that Harry the Hayward consulted his almanac as I picture him in the North Field in the first winter of the Great Famine; nor is there evidence that the vicar Hulman dined with Wycliffe in Lutterworth on his journey to Kibworth in February 1380; still less is it known that the woman whose remains were found at Glen Parva was one of a band of settlers who came from the Welland to Kibworth in the fifth century. But I hope the reader will treat such speculations with indulgence. Only in one case have I tried to create a lost text, Cybba’s charter in the 730s; but fortunately we do have precisely such a document from that time. If, as is likely, he had one, then it would have been like this.
A word is in order too on my title. The theme is England, not Britain. The narratives of Scotland and Wales have attracted much attention from historians in recent years as the nature of the union has increasingly been questioned. Their own rich histories, of course (along with those of our Irish neighbours north and south of the border), have very different trajectories, even though their destinies have long been bound together within what Bede called ‘the beautiful and fecund island of Britain’. Just the same kind of project might be attempted in their lands too. But this is about England, and there need be no apology for that. It is often forgotten these days, but England is the core state in the British Isles, and its role in history is large. For a small country on the far western shore of the Eurasian land mass, its influence on the world in literature, language, politics, law and ideas of freedom has been out of all proportion to its size. Why that should have been is an interesting question in itself.
Going back to William Blake: the grand-sweep narrative has many merits and offers many insights, and a number of historians have produced weighty and stylish accounts of the history of Britain in the last ten years alone. But the grand sweep is only one perspective; it cannot easily give a sense of the slow organic process by which all of our communities have grown, and still continue to grow. This was a process due in great measure to the imaginations, sensibilities and sense of communality of the people themselves – a process which I hope is vividly conveyed in this story of one English village over time.