One of the great pleasures of local history is the range of evidence involved, from manorial rolls to photos and diaries from our own time. A Second World War village newspaper or a landgirl’s diary is just as informative and delightful as a builder’s account from 1448 or a medieval butcher’s letter. This bibliography makes no pretence of completeness. These are simply some of the books which I found helpful for both the big and the small pictures. These books can help you get through your Manchester English course if you are learning the language at Communicate School. I have not attempted to reference every source or quotation, but it will be obvious that this book is based on the work of many scholars and writers.
First, by way of introduction, an article about the historian whose work shadows this book, W. G. Hoskins: ‘Hoskins’ England’ by Charles Phythian-Adams in the Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society (TLAHS), LXVI (1992); then a fascinating look at the culture of the English provinces: ‘An Agenda for English Local History’, in Societies, Cultures and Kinship 1580–1850: Cultural Provinces and English Local History, edited and with an introduction by Charles Phythian-Adams (1993), an overview of the wealth of English local history published between Lambarde’s Perambulation of Kent and the present day. On the early searchers, Hoskins’s ‘Rediscovery of England’, in Provincial England (1963), is still seminal. His pioneering The Making of the English Landscape (1955 and subsequent editions) is a broad introduction to landscape history, to which Francis Pryor’s The Making of the British Landscape (2010) is a worthy successor. David Stocker, The East Midlands (2006), is a handsome and informative addition to the English Heritage England’s Landscape series. The early travellers still offer much food for thought, especially Leland’s Itinerary, ed. L. Toulmin Smith (5 vols., 1964). The great local history of Nichols (1795–1815) is described in my text; it is the predecessor of all later ones down to Hoskins’s Leicestershire (1957) and Roy Millward’s A History of Leicestershire and Rutland (1985). The Victoria County History for Gartree Hundred is available in the British History online website – an indispensable resource. The English Place Name Society volumes for the shire, edited by Barrie Cox (4 vols., 1998–2009), came out just in time to transform this book. I should also mention David Postles’s remarkable book on The Surnames of Leicestershire and Rutland (1998), an invaluable social history of much wider import than the county and the surnames, on which I have relied for my accounts of Sibil and Scholastica in chapter 9, along with the stories of the ‘brokers’. G. Farnham’sLeicestershire Medieval Village Notes (6 vols. 1929–33) provides invaluable transcriptions of key documents.
On village history – and on Kibworth – Hoskins was again the modern pioneer. It was Frank Attenborough (the Anglo-Saxonist father of the naturalist David) who brought the Devonian ‘Bill’ Hoskins to Leicester University to found the Local History Unit, the most important in Britain. A flurry of publications in the TLAHS followed in the post-war period and several important books such as Essays in Leicestershire History (1950), Provincial England (1963) and Hoskins’s famous study of Wigston, The Midland Peasant(1965). Studies in Leicestershire Agrarian History (edited by Hoskins in 1949) contains a most important essay on Kibworth by an alumnus of my old school, Manchester Grammar School: Rodney Hilton, ‘Kibworth Harcourt, a Merton Manor in the 13th and 14th centuries’ (reprinted in his Class, Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism of 1985). This brilliant essay, following F. M. Maitland’s lead but deploying Marxist principles, showed how the local tale of one place could reveal the workings of great movements in history. Since then other Merton manors have been looked at (Paul Harvey on Cuxham, for example, in A Medieval Oxfordshire Village, 1965), but it was Hilton’s lead that led Cicely Howell to write her pathbreaking book, the fundamental work in this story, Land, Family and Inheritance in Transition: Kibworth Harcourt 1280–1700. Cicely Howell’s work has been on my mind as a possible film project almost since it came out in 1983.
Next it is appropriate to mention a few recent studies of medieval life. One of the earliest and best, Ada Levett’s Studies in Manorial History (1938), inspired my film about a medieval villein, Christina: A Medieval Life (2008). More recently there has been a huge amount of work on medieval peasant society. Hoskins’s current successor at Leicester, Christopher Dyer, for example, has produced a grand-sweep social history from 850 to 1520, Making a Living in the Middle Ages (2002), as well as An Age of Transition?(2005) and many other studies, including Village, Hamlet and Field, with C. Lewis and P. Fox (2001). An important aspect of all this is women’s history: here I should mention Henrietta Leyser, Medieval Women (1995); Marjorie Keniston McIntosh,Working Women in English Society 1300–1620 (2005); Women in Medieval English Society, ed. P. J. P. Goldberg (1997); Cordelia Beattie, Medieval Single Women (2007); and a pioneering life of one woman, Judith Bennett’s A Medieval Life (1998).
The medieval sources for Kibworth are extraordinarily rich but how could one construct a narrative before that time? Here are a few pointers. On the pre-Conquest period in general, see my bibliography in Domesday (1986 and later editions). On DNA, see Stephen Oppenheimer, The Origins of the British (2006); David Miles, The Tribes of Britain (2005), is an amazing piece of synthesis. On the Roman period, a new introduction is David Mattingly, An Imperial Possession: Britain in the Roman Empire (2006). On the Anglo-Saxons, the best general guide is The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England, eds. Michael Lapidge and others (1999). On the coming of Christianity and attitudes to life, death and the afterlife, a new look is provided by Marilyn Dunn in The Christianization of the Anglo-Saxons c.597–c.700 (2009).
Mercia is still poorly served, but for a good introduction see M. Brown and C. Farr, Mercia: An Anglo-Saxon Kingdom in Europe (2001). There are useful discussions of Mercian origins in The Origins of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, ed. S. R. Bassett (1989). The Staffordshire hoard has created a huge amount of discussion online but in print see the British Museum publication by Kevin Leahy and Roger Bland, The Staffordshire Hoard (2009).
On the Church, the fundamental introduction is John Blair, The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (2005); on holy men and women, Graham Jones, Saints in the Landscape (2007). On early English law, there is Patrick Wormald’s formidable The Making of English Law (1999). For the later Old English period see M. Lapidge and S. Keynes, Alfred the Great (1983), and English Historical Documents, ed. D. Whitelock (1979). On the Vikings, see D. Hadley, The Vikings in England (2006), and P. Stafford, The EastMidlands in the Early Middle Ages (1985). On the Kingdom of the English in the tenth century see my In Search of England (1999) and Domesday (1986). On the revolution of the 930s, see my recent essay in Lay Intellectuals in the Carolingian World, eds. Patrick Wormald and Janet L. Nelson (2007).
Domesday Book is available county by county in Phillimore editions; see also The Norman Conquest of Leicestershire and Rutland, ed. C. Phythian-Adams (1986). R. W. H. Erskine and Ann Williams (eds.), The Story of Domesday Book (2003), is a very useful guide; see also my Domesday. The Leicestershire Survey of 1130 has been edited by C. F. Slade (1956). For a masterly broad narrative of the period, see D. Carpenter, The Struggle for Mastery (2003). On the Barons’ War, see J. R. Maddicott, Simon de Montfort(1994), and, specifically on the final battle, D. C. Cox, The Battle of Evesham (1988). On the Peatling Magna incident, see D. Carpenter, The Reign of King Henry III (1996), and my essay in In Search of England together with the references there. On the Hundred Rolls, see Sandra Raban, A Second Domesday? (2004); the manuscript of the lost Leicestershire Hundred Rolls is an eighteenth-century copy of Burton’s notes: Bodleian Library, Rawlinson B 350. On English language and identity, see Thorlac Turville-Petre,England the Nation (1996). The fundamental book on literacy is M. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record (1979 and later editions). On education, see Nicholas Orme, Medieval Schools: From Roman Britain to Tudor England (2006).
On Kibworth school and the school box, now being catalogued at Wigston, see Bernard Elliott, A History of Kibworth Beauchamp Grammar School (1957). For references to other early materials touching on Kibworth people’s land grants, guild records, tallage lists and coroners’ rolls, consult F. M. Stenton, Documents Illustrative of the Social and Economic History of the Danelaw (1920); Borough Records of Leicester, ed. M. Bateson (6 vols., 1899); and A. H. Thomson, Calendar of Charters and Other Documents Belonging to the Hospital of William Wyggeston at Leicester (1933). On the free peasantry generally in the East Midlands in the Norman period, see F. M. Stenton, The Free Peasantry of the Northern Danelaw (1969), and my Domesday (1986). On the famine, see W. C. Jordan, The Great Famine (1996), and Ian Kershaw, ‘The Great Famine and Agrarian Crisis in England, 1315–22’, in R. H. Hilton, Peasants, Knights and Heretics (1976). For overview essays of great value see A Social History of England 1200–1500, eds. R. Horrox and W. M. Ormrod (2006).
There are a number of sources for the manor and the open fields. See especially Mark Bailey’s The English Manor (2002) and Medieval Society and the Manor Court, eds. Zvi Razi and Richard Smith (1996). For details on the open fields see C. S. and C. S. Orwin, The Open Fields (1938 and later editions but the earliest is best as it contains documents and maps); see too John Beckett, A History of Laxton (1989). On weather data I have used Derek Stern’s book on one farm, A Hertford Demesne of Westminster Abbey(1999). Michelle Brown, The World of the Luttrell Psalter (2006), is a typically nuanced exploration. Roy Brigden, Ploughs and Ploughing (2003), is part of a very useful Shire publications series on rural labour. On ploughmen and their culture generally, see Michael Camille, A Mirror in Parchment (1998).
On medieval historical and political poetry, Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries, ed. R. H. Robbins (1959), is still indispensable, as are Thomas Wright, Political Songs of England, ed. P. Coss (1996); R. T. Davies’s anthology Medieval English Lyrics (1963); and Early Middle English Texts, eds. B. Dickins and R. M. Wilson (rev. edn 1956).
The best overview of the Black Death is Ole J. Benedictow, The Black Death 1346–1353 (2004). John Hatcher, The Black Death: An Intimate History (2008), is a vivid account at grass-roots level. The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, ed. R. B. Dobson (2nd edn 1983), is the best collection of sources on the subject. The peasants’ use of writing is a great issue in the pioneering study of Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion (1994); two important recent studies on the subject are Wendy Scase, Literature and Complaint in England, 1272–1553 (2007), and Andrew Cole, Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer (2008).
An incredible wealth of material has emerged on the Lollards in the last fifty years. The Lollard Society is online, and classic older accounts have been superseded by Anne Hudson’s The Premature Reformation (1988) and Lollards and Their Books (1985). Margaret Aston, ‘Lollardy and Sedition’, is an important essay in Peasants, Knights and Heretics, ed. R. H. Hilton (1976). J. Crompton, Leicestershire Lollards, in TLAHS (1968–9) is the key local study. For the Merton links I am indebted to Maureen Jurkowski, ‘Heresy and Factionalism at Merton College in the Early Fifteenth Century’, in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History (vol. 48, 1997), and to her many other articles. Richard Rex, The Lollards (2002), is a new look. For pointers towards the aftermath and possible continuities, see The World of Rural Dissenters, 1520–1725, ed. M. Spufford (1995).
Susan Brigden, New Worlds, Lost Worlds (2000), offers a general history of the Tudor period. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (1992), is a grand-sweep narrative of the Reformation. For a close-up view see his The Voices of Morebath (2001). On mentalities, see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), and Man and the Natural World (1983).
For Kibworth, Cicely Howell’s book is rich on family histories through this period, but the history of the Reformation in the village is yet to be told, and I am conscious that my account is no more than a brief sketch. The Tudor wills cited in my text are all published here for the first time and were transcribed by Pat Grundy from original manuscripts in the Leicestershire Record Office in Wigston, and I must express my gratitude to Robin Jenkins for permitting their publication here. A catalogue of the astounding number of Tudor and Stuart wills from Leicestershire is available in Wigston. For interpretation of such data, the many books of David Cressy are a good start, for example Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion and the Life Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England(1997). On the theory of the growth of capitalism see Alan Macfarlane, Marriage and Love in England 1300–1840 (1986), and his classic The Origins of English Individualism. See also Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (1977).
Among many books on the Civil War are Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution (1976); David Underdown, Fire From Heaven (1992) and A Freeborn People (1996); and D. E. Kennedy, The English Revolution (2000). On the radical movements out of which, for example, the Quakers came, see Christopher Hill’s essay on George Fox in The Experience of Defeat (1984) and also The World Turned Upside Down (1972). The Beginnings of Quakerism is the classic account by William C. Braithwaite (rev. edn 1955); see too Adrian Davies, The Quakers in English Society 1655–1725 (2000). Nonconformity (so strong in Kibworth) is a very rich seam: see Michael Mullett, Sources for the History of English Nonconformity 1660–1830 (1991), for the British Records Association. Also useful are the Society of Genealogists’ guides, especially on religious groups such as Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists and Jews in Britain. David Clifford, My Ancestors were Congregationalists (rev. edn 1997), is a very useful reference work on the local communities. Kibworth Methodist Church has published a useful booklet on the history of dissenting congregations in the area: Eileen Bromley, Kibworth Methodist Church: A Celebration (1996). Much anticipated is a forthcoming study of the Kibworth Academy by David Wykes, the curator of the Dr Williams Library in the Centre for Dissenting Studies, London.
In the Industrial Age we leave Cicely Howell’s work behind. For a broad picture the classic is E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (rev. edn 1968), which is very concerned with the textile industries of the East Midlands and framework knitting in Leicestershire. On this the old histories are by Felkin (1867) and Henson (1831); a modern guide is Marilyn Palmer, Framework Knitting (2002), but see too Richard Rutt, A History of Hand Knitting (1987). Jess Jenkins has written a vivid account of the knitters in the Kibworth area: Honest Men But Destitute: The Plight of Leicestershire’s Framework Knitters in the 1840s (2005); see too D. Smith, Industrial Archaeology of the East Midlands (1965). On enclosure, see W. G. Hoskins, Studies in Leicestershire Agrarian History (1949), and on roads, Arthur Cossens, The Turnpike Roads of Leicestershire and Rutland (2003).
For the Victorian world, nineteenth-century Kibworth like most places in the UK has a very rich archive of standard government sources, censuses, Poor Laws, crime records, education Acts, and so on, some of which are being published by the Kibworth History Society, as are more recent memoirs such as those of G. Ringrose and Rose Holyoak which are quoted in this book. Jess Jenkins’s work on local suffragettes, which I have gratefully used, is forthcoming in the TLAHS.
For both broad sweep and intimate detail on the modern period see Peter Hennessy, Never Again: Britain 1945–51 (1992), and Having It So Good: Britain in the 1950s (2006). David Kynaston, Austerity Britain 1945–51 (2007), and Brian Harrison, Finding a Role? The United Kingdom 1970–1990, are models by great modern practitioners for how to write the history of our own times.
A brief word on the huge amount of information now on the internet. A very useful site for the local historian is A2A, which connects with the National Archives website: simply key in the name of your place and all catalogued documents in local and national archives will be listed. The National Archives itself is a great resource; from national censuses to military service records, a huge amount of raw data of our ancestors’ lives is now available to the general researcher. The British Library also has a great online arm now. The PASE website references every named person who lived pre-Conquest in England; the Anglo-Saxon charters website has all pre-Conquest land documents with full bibliography and references to translations where available. Local archives and County Record Offices like Wigston all have their own websites, as do many villages. Kibworth’s own website connects to the very useful Kibworth Chronicle site, which has many articles and features, including the autobiography of the redoubtable Edmund Knox.
Finally, a separate note is in order on the most important Merton manuscripts consulted here (and a special thanks here to Cicely Howell for her advice and for her transcripts of most of the key ones). Walter of Merton’s purchase of the village is in MM 2877; Saer’s debts to a Jewish moneylender – written in Hebrew – are in MM 2884; the first survey of c.1280 is in MM 6371; the statement of peasants’ dues is in MM 6370; the eight acres of Richard the parson is in MM 2928; in MM 6368 is a bundle of materials including the field strips described ex parte solis; the Black Death 1349 roll is in MM 6405; the 1361 plague list is in MM 6372; John Pychard’s letter is in MM 3344; the poor scholars of Kibworth are in e.g. MM 3622; the Polle family pedigrees are in MM 6365 and MM 6464; the building accounts for ‘Brown’s Place’ are in MM 6324 and 6465; the 1447 Court of Recognition after the rent strike is in MM 6415.2, 6425.1; the inquiry into Nick Sibil’s land and the succession of young John Sibil during the great famine is in MM 6219. For a list of other key manuscripts relating to families followed in this book, plus a full transcript of Pychard’s letter, see Cicely Howell’s book. On Merton and the Lollards, special thanks to Maureen Jurkowski: for Hulman going north on college business, see MM 3712; the activities of Gamalgay and associates are in MM 3720, MM 6278–80; taking monies from the village is in MM 6285; for Stoneham’s visits to Kibworth (the friend of the lawyer Ralph Strode, Chaucer’s friend), see MM 3718; on the link between Brown and the Dexters, see MM 6281; on the Gilberts, see MM 6276, 6277, 6280.