1. St Wilfrid’s church, Kibworth. The nave and porch are from the fourteenth century, as was the spire, which fell in 1825. The centre of village social life for at least 700 years, it may have had an Anglo-Saxon predecessor.
2. The ‘Spear Tree’: the site of the Gartree on the Roman road north of Kibworth. On the site of a Bronze Age burial mound, this was the meeting place of local juries from Anglo-Saxon times till the 1720s and gave its name to the local hundred.
3./4./5. Merton College, Oxford: the lords of Kibworth Harcourt from 1270. In the fourteenth-century library is the archive of one English village extending over 750 years.
6. Merton’s survey of Kibworth Harcourt from around 1280, with the lists of free and customary tenants and (in the fourth section of text) the cottagers, ending on ‘Roger the Miller’ and ‘Alice the Washerwoman’.
7. St Wilfrid’s, Kibworth, in the late eighteenth century: with a spire at 160 feet, it was one of the tallest country churches in England. To the right, the 1788 vicarage was built by the site of a Roman cemetery.
8. ‘Soldiers turn into reformers’: the mood on the eve of the Civil War. The destruction of images, altars and altar rails was the fate of Kibworth church probably between 1547 and 1552. In the 1640s the Puritan vicar John Yaxley joined the soldier iconoclasts and threw out the font.
9. A fifteenth-century set of Lollard vernacular sermons from Leicester, perhaps written close to Kibworth. Such English texts were secretly copied and disseminated in the area by the likes of John Barun ‘alias Toogood, alias Scrivener’, who was among the Kibworth rebels in the rising of 1413–14.
10. The burning of Sir John Oldcastle at St Giles’ Fields in 1417: a number of Kibworth villagers had supported his cause and two, brothers Walter and Nicholas Gilbert, were executed on the same spot.
11. An eight-ox plough team still working in the 1920s in Sussex: the main draft animals from Roman and Anglo-Saxon times until the Middle Ages. Accompanied by his boy with his long goad, the ploughman was the medieval Everyman.
12. Black Death pits: the first scientific excavation in Britain near Tower Hill, London. In Kibworth Harcourt forty-seven tenants – men and women – died in the first outbreak, along with unknown numbers of their family and children: two thirds of the population. Tradition still points out the village death pit on the A6, south-east of the village.
13. Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century housing in Erle Street, Coventry, before the Blitz of 1940 and the ravages of post-war developers: here, Adam Brown of Kibworth’s son set up with his new wife in a community of well-off merchants and drapers, some of whom supported the Lollard heresy.
14. Framework-knitters: a family room with the redundant technology of the spinning wheel in the background. With the invention of the frame in the 1590s, knitting spread as a home industry and it became a key East Midlands industry from the eighteenth century, later the main employment in Kibworth Beauchamp.
15. Harold Bromley at a hosiery frame, 1950s: his family have been in the village for over 400 years.
16. The Johnson & Barnes factory in the Victorian ‘New Town’ in Kibworth Beauchamp: Johnson & Barnes were a major employer, 1901–68.
17. Medieval technology: the post windmill at Kibworth Harcourt, which ceased to be used in the early twentieth century.
18. The bridge at Debdale Wharf on the Grand Union Canal below Kibworth.
19. Culture: theatrical tradition was strong in the village, from mummers’ plays to visiting professional theatre companies. This poster from 1790 advertises a topical anti-slavery play, Inkle and Yarico, whose sponsor lived at the Manor House in Kibworth Beauchamp.
20. Plough Monday processions and dances were an old East Midlands tradition still performed in Kibworth in the 1930s.
The coming of the railways saw the transformation of Kibworth from a rural community to almost a small town.
21./ 22. Navvies photographed by the Leicester photographer Sidney Newton.
23. Opened in 1857, Kibworth station was closed over a century later.
Shopping: by the 1860s Kibworth had drapers, grocers, sweet shops and a newsagent’s.
24. Dalton’s shoe shop. Albert Dalton in the doorway of his Reliable Boot Stores. The shop is now the village fish-and-chip shop.
25. George Lynn (far left in the picture above) standing outside his shop, the main general store from late-Victorian times till after the Second World War.
26. Eli and Floss Bale outside their draper’s shop, around 1900.
27. Drink: there were once twenty-three inns and drinking houses in Kibworth. The four survivors include the now rebuilt Old Swan.
28. The Rose and Crown, a big coaching inn which is now Raitha’s Indian Restaurant.
29. The Coach and Horses, where Thomas Cook famously waited for his ride.
30. Like most English villages of any size Victorian Kibworth had a rich cultural life, music being especially important. The brass band was a fixture in village life from the 1860s.
31. Sport too was a great feature of Victorian working-class culture: cricket in Kibworth goes back 200 years, with the cricket club founded in the 1840s but only recently becoming national village champions; the village ground (seen here in the 1950s, but today with a spanking new pavilion) is a venue for women’s internationals.
32. Politics and dissent: 1897 jubilee flags in front of the Old House, home to Kibworth’s famous dissenting academy in the eighteenth century, and where the poet, feminist, anti-slavery campaigner and pioneer children’s writer Anna Laetitia Barbauld grew up.
33. Radical politics: the 1905 Leicester unemployed march on London was the forerunner of the Jarrow march. Three heroic figures in the workers’ struggle: Amos Sherriff, the Rev. F. L. Donaldson and George White.
34./ 35. War: forty village men died in the First World War. George Maynard Ward, aged eighteen in 1917, and Percy Bromley, killed in France with his brother Cecil in 1918; both families have been in the village for over 400 years.
36. Kibworth: ‘Our grumbling friendly warm-hearted village’, as Leslie Clarke put it in the wartime village newspaper, photographed by the Luftwaffe in November 1940.
37./ 38. The Home Front: Rose Holyoak, ploughing as some of her medieval women ancestors did. In the Second World War, Kibworth had a Home Guard unit, a POW camp and a Landgirls’ hostel and sheltered evacuees from London.
39. The Forces’ Journal, which was sent to all serving villagers, a ‘memory chain link’ with ‘that certain village back home in dear old England’.