Near the centre of England, not far from the crossing of the Fosse Way and Watling Street, where rolling hills stretch south to Rutland, the walker comes upon an ancient trackway that can be followed for miles along hawthorn hedges past occasional clumps of oak and gaunt stagheads of elm and ash. An offshoot of the Jurassic Way, this prehistoric path runs from the Wash all the way down to the south-west. Fording the River Wreake at Melton Mowbray, it skirts the great Iron Age fort of Burrough Hill, then winds south by Robin a’ Tiptoe Hill through the heart of the Midlands, across the Avon watershed and on to the great prehistoric sacred circle at Avebury and the creation mound and springs at Silbury Hill. But here on the south Leicestershire upland, the road runs along a saddle which divides the Trent and the Welland, passing through pretty villages, Tilton and Illston on the Hill, and down into a lovely valley beyond Carlton Curlieu. Here for several miles the road is followed by the parish boundaries – a sure hint of its great age. On either side the green pasture is etched by the curving ridge and furrow of the medieval plough teams, faint gores and headlands, the deep bone structure of their world.
Near this route Beaker people left their burials 4,000 years ago accompanied by their distinctive upright pottery with its pitted rims and chequered patterns. But the origin of this track probably lies in the Middle Bronze Age, roughly between 1500 and 1000 BC, a time which saw the beginnings of organized societies in Britain, and with them for the first time long-distance trade. Along it over the last two or three centuries there have been stray finds of Bronze Age tools: a chisel and a flanged axe at Kibworth; at Husbands Bosworth a merchant’s hoard of bronze implements – nine socketed axes, gauges and chisels, two long spearheads and a sturdy ferrule for a spear stock. These are the first hints of a human story, conjuring up the image of a buskined Bronze Age brogger striding out under wide Midland skies clutching his precious pedlar’s pack of tools which he had made and hoped to sell or barter somewhere along the route. A pointer too to individual human initiative and enterprise, which will be the running thread of this narrative.
Much later, but still before the Norman Conquest, the track was used by English peasant levies in their grim struggles against the Vikings. Then the Anglo-Saxons called it a ‘herepath’, an ‘army path’, and in the Middle Ages it was still remembered locally as ‘le ferdgate’, combining the French direct article and the Old English word for army ( fyrd ) with the Scandinavian word for road – gata – in the speech of the Viking settlers who came here in the late ninth century.
At a weathered cast-iron signpost marked ‘Gartree Road’ the old track crosses the Roman Via Devana. For many hundreds of years the Gartree Bush or ‘Council Tree’ stood here, where a cluster of gnarled elms made a ring round an old grey thorn on an ancient tumulus. This was the local moot place known as methelou (the ‘meeting’ or ‘speech’ mound). From Old English times right down to the Georgians it was the gathering place of the members of the hundred, the old English unit of local administration which lies at the root of the English representative system. This is where the Domesday jurors from Kibworth and surrounding villages met William the Conqueror’s assessors in spring 1086 to describe their lands and communities, and to grudgingly declare their wealth; where for centuries the local court deliberated, and as an aged eyewitness remembered in the 1790s, ‘the impanneling of the jury, and the paying of the chief rents and many other things used to be performed.’ (It is easy to forget it now, but English freeholders were long accustomed to vote in the open air like their Anglo-Saxon ancestors, even in some places as late as the nineteenth century.) From the site of the Gartree thorn the track continues through Tur Langton, past the Bull’s Head (the jurors’ traditional watering hole, now boarded up and awaiting a saviour), until the white sails of Kibworth windmill can be seen peeping over the trees on the left-hand side. Half an hour’s brisk walk takes the traveller down into the little white-painted lanes of workers’ cottages at the back end of Kibworth Harcourt.
Kibworth now is almost a small town: in miniature it’s the kind of place most Britons live in today. It straddles a main arterial road, the A6, and is easily passed by without a second thought; at rush hour the commuter traffic roars through in ruthless disregard of the pedestrian. Behind the trees there are new housing estates and concrete and glass infill, but the older core is of handsome timber-framed houses made of warm red Leicestershire brick. By the Jubilee gardens, there is a late-seventeenth-century grandee’s house, with high chimneys, scrolled pediments and stucco pilasters (in the eighteenth century the dissenting ‘academy’ which was sited in the building had a curriculum unrivalled in Britain). Across the road by the village pump is the old ‘slang’, once the cart track to the open fields, now gated and thick with fallen branches and leaf mulch, and a much older farmhouse of red brick on an ironstone base with Victorian diamond diaper work on the garden wall. By the gate a weathered terracotta plaque marks successive rebuildings in 1475, 1695 and 1860 (though now tree ring dating gives us another new build in 1385 and one even back before the Black Death, in the 1320s after the Great Famine). Harcourt’s seven Georgian coaching inns are gone: the old Rose and Crown is now Raitha’s Indian restaurant and the Lord Nelson is the Boboli pizzeria; only the Coach and Horses is still a pub, with carriage wheels and a painted inn sign depicting the London mail. (This curiously enough was the place where a young Thomas Cook stood at the side of the road waiting for the stagecoach and dreamed up the idea of modern tourism.)
Walking away from the main road, the visitor comes to the medieval church of St Wilfrid in golden ironstone surrounded by old yew trees in a grassy churchyard full of fine tombstones in local slate, with a monument to the men of Kibworth who died in the Great War. Further on, the road descends to the now disused railway station, which was closed in 1968 after the Beeching reform. This is Kibworth Beauchamp, which in contrast to Kibworth Harcourt was a workers’ place during the Industrial Revolution; then it was known in some quarters, somewhat disparagingly, as ‘radical’ or ‘stockeners’ Kibworth. Beauchamp still has many three-storey weavers’ cottages with their typical tall workshop windows on the top floors, and behind the houses by the traffic island is the big range of a derelict framework knitting factory which served as the telephone exchange during the Second World War. Beauchamp, like Harcourt, is a medieval settlement, but virtually all that survives from that period is an early-Tudor manor house opposite the off licence, with whitewashed stables and a pretty cupola topped by a clock and a weather vane. Here in the centre of the village there’s a busy Co-op, and a tiny bookshop which runs children’s evenings and a women’s reading group; there’s the Swan Inn, the Firenze Italian restaurant, Indian and Chinese takeaways, a new secondary school, a sports complex and a cricket field (Kibworth’s cricketers were in 2008 the national village cricket champions). At the end of the village is the ‘New Town’, with rows of Victorian terraces built a century and a half ago, when the population here expanded three or four times in a few generations, as did that of England as a whole. But human beings have lived in this landscape for a very long time, starting after the settlement of lowland Britain following the end of the last Ice Age. By about 8000 BC, there is evidence of nomadic hunter-gatherers, whose flint tools and arrowheads have been picked up in village closes. Beyond the back gardens of the Kibworth Fish Bar and the Moka Coffee Shop, up on Smeeton Hill (whose brooding outline borders the parish towards the west), Beaker people left their burials, and nearby metal detectorists have picked up gold and silver coins of the Corieltauvi, one of the tribes and kingdoms which underlie our oldest regional identities, what historians now recognize as the different ‘pays’ of England.
From the highest point of the village, looking to the north-west, there are wide views across central England to Leicester Forest and Charnwood. These are the ‘champain’ lands described by the travellers John Leland and Celia Fiennes: what local farmers still describe as the ‘best fattening land in England’. And on the horizon eight or nine miles away is Leicester itself. Like all our urban conurbations which have grown apace since the nineteenth century, this once small Tudor town has spread its suburbs in every direction, swallowing the thriving medieval villages of Wigston, Oadby and Blaby, welcoming newcomers from all over the world. Indeed, Leicester intends to be the first city in the world to declare all its ethnic communities minorities, even the so-called ‘white English’: when that happens it will be the first truly multiracial place on earth.
Unlikely as it may seem, then, unpromising as today’s landscapes perhaps appear at first sight, the earlier pasts are still here, in the streets and fields, and they exist in the place names too. Linguists specializing in the prehistory of British speech tell us that this area was ‘the Land of Rivers’. The Roman name of the city, Ratae, didn’t survive their departure, but the pre-Roman name did; for Leicester derives from Ligoracester in Anglo-Saxon, which means the fortified town of the Ligore, an ancient river name used to describe themselves by the early Celtic folk who settled here. The name was still current in the twelfth century when William of Malmesbury described the Legra ‘flowing past the town’. And indeed the name is still with us. Though today the river down to its confluence with the Trent is called Soar, in old maps and documents it changes its name somewhere under the Victorian railway arches of Leicester and becomes the Leir, one of whose tributaries rises ten miles to the south, near Watling Street and the Warwickshire border near the tiny village of Leire. This very ancient name comes from the same pre-English word Legra – which with delightful synchronicity is identical to the Roman name for the Loire – a pleasing thought for Midlanders!
So in a place where it might be thought that all trace of the deep past had been erased by the early twenty-first century, the encoded memories which have taken millennia to build up are still in places retrievable, even though so much has been rubbed away since industrialization and the ensuing boom in population from 8 million in 1800 to almost 70 million today. In England the landscape has always been more than the sum of its parts: the English have always mythologized every corner. In every small locality it is possible to see part of the whole story. Which is perhaps why the local history of every county, parish and village has been more intensively cultivated here than anywhere in the world: in the belief that every place is its own version of the grand narrative, that every place is also part of the national story.
Corieltauvi: the Hallaton treasure
So our village grew up in a prehistoric ‘Land of Rivers’, whose ancient names though largely unnoticed still grace our modern maps. The first inhabitants here after the Ice Age were pre-Celtic Mesolithic people who came into Britain from about 8000 BConwards, and to whom today’s British owe much of their DNA. Around Kibworth they left their hand-worked flints and arrowheads. Then came the Celts in the late Iron Age who lived in permanent settlements with circular huts, cattle corrals and fields. They made pottery and bronze tools and traded widely, importing ceramics, metalwork and luxury products from Roman Gaul. The Celtic tribe in the region were long known to us (from a passage in the geographer Ptolemy) as the Coritani but from recent finds we now know their name was in fact Corieltauvi. They spoke a dialect of a language ancestral to modern Welsh, akin to that preserved in the earliest Welsh poetry. As we shall see, there are still faint traces of their speech to be found in field names and topographical features in the landscape around Kibworth and its neighbouring villages. They occupied the lands east of the Trent around the Soar, the Welland and the Nene (Celtic or pre-Celtic names all). The tribe had two or three centres and perhaps two or three ‘kings’ ruling at any one time from hubs in Leicestershire and Lincolnshire. Only recently the sensational discovery made at Hallaton near Kibworth of a hoard of well over 5,000 gold and copper Corieltauvian coins – the largest Iron Age hoard ever found in Britain – has given a glittering picture of the wealth of these local communities on the eve of the Roman invasion. On a wooded hill inside a ditched sacred enclosure the treasure was deposited with thousands of pig bones, the leftovers of sacrificial rituals; with them were silver ingots, bowls, plaques and jewellery, and even a Roman parade helmet. The hoard perhaps was in some sense a tribal treasure. On the coins are the resonant names of shadowy Corieltauvian kings, including some previously unknown: Volisios, Dumnocoveros, Dumnvellaunus, Cartivelos and ‘Vepo the son of Cor’. New finds at Kibworth Harcourt of a magnificent gold stater and a silver coin of the Corieltauvi hint too at a settled society with a money economy which under its kings seems relatively seamlessly to have become Roman – a process that would be repeated in these parts over the intervening centuries with succeeding invasions, settlements and migrations, right down to today.
That’s the historical setting for the village which is the subject of this story. We will call it Kibworth. But in reality, as locals will tell the visitor, there is no such place. For as we have seen already, the old parish contains two Kibworths divided now by the railway track. Both bear the names of their twelfth-century Norman landlords: Kibworth Harcourt and Kibworth Beauchamp, originally perhaps ‘Upper’ and ‘Lower’, which lingered on in local speech until this century as ‘Top’ and ‘Bottom’ ‘Kibburth’. Their stories have been proverbially different – Harcourt is said to be a posh, country, horse and hounds, agricultural kind of place; Beauchamp on the other hand was said to be a poorer village with an industrial history and a reputation for non-conformism and dissent. Edmund Knox, the redoubtable vicar during the 1880s, tells an amusing tale that the two communities even argued in the parish hall about sharing a common sewerage system, the Harcourt gentry being reluctant to contemplate their effluent being ‘contaminated’ with that of the mere ‘stockeners’. (A testimony when all is said and done to how the serendipity of history can divide even the very closest of neighbours!)
The Kibworths with their contrasting histories form the core of this story, but we should also mention the other component of the old parish, the hamlet of Smeeton Westerby on the southern edge of Kibworth, with its farms and smithy, its tall weavers’ cottages, its crowded allotment gardens and its pub, the King’s Arms – a real old-fashioned alehouse with tap room and snug. Today a place which keeps to itself, behind red brick walls, no bigger than it was in the 1880s, Smeeton is a small farming hamlet whose families have always intermarried with those of the Kibworths but it is a place with its own distinctive history going back into Anglo-Saxon times, when, as its name suggests, it was a settlement of metalworkers, the ‘smiths’ tun’.
Kibworth is a plain place then with no frills, and it might be thought with nothing special to recommend it, nothing out of the ordinary. It is Middle England, geographically and historically. In its history one might think it is no different from thousands of other places. But here as everywhere the tides of history have left their mark on the lives of the ordinary people: sometimes in the most extraordinary way, from the Black Death to the Civil War and the Industrial Revolution, with turnpikes, canals and railways, highwaymen, suffragettes and soldiers on the Somme. As with most villages in England solid documentary evidence for this history only begins in the eleventh century with William the Conqueror’s Domesday survey, and then manorial rentals, court rolls, poll taxes, Tudor wills and all the obsessive recording, accounting and measuring of the medieval rentiers. But long before that it had a community, with field systems, customs and dues, forms of authority and justice, one of thousands of places from which the national story grew and crystallized. And it is the growth of that community which is the story told in this book.
The focus where possible is on the lives of the ordinary people. History from the bottom up is not so fashionable these days as the lives of kings and queens and of the nobility, but it offers great insights. Of course, only through examining the source material for working people can we see the lives of the bulk of the people of England through their history. But such sources can also be strikingly revealing about the national story and how it impinged on, and how it was shaped by, the local community. It is also true to say that though local history has often been dismissed as a lesser branch of historical studies, it is only through close examination of local conditions that real historical change can be observed. A case in point is the great change in society from the feudal order to a capitalist and industrial society. In a place like Kibworth, where the documents are so rich almost year by year from the late thirteenth century to the turn of the eighteenth, it is possible to see close up the economic and social forces which led to the breakdown of the medieval structures of lordship and exploitation and the rise of individualism and capitalism. In other words, the big picture can be generalized, but it can only be particularized at the level of the communities who themselves lived through such changes.
But to take the lives of the people back beyond the period of parish registers and hearth taxes and to try to touch the experience and even the voice of the English back in the time when many of their key institutions and ideas were still being shaped – all this presents some knotty problems for the historian. For most places in England it is simply not possible to do so before the sixteenth century. So to begin to construct our historical narrative the first task is a necessarily allusive one; namely to try to get some sense of the history of the community before the documents, when our only clues come from sifting fragments: coins, sherds, bone combs, bronze pins and brooches, the good gifts of archaeology. And with that search, as a kind of prologue, our story begins.
The early searchers: a chorography of England
By a pleasing coincidence, at the very moment when Edward Blunt was proofreading the first sheets of Shakespeare’s First Folio in the Jaggards’ printing shop in the autumn of 1622, another work was going through his press which is the first marker in our story: indeed, after a licensing snag over Troilus and Cressida, Blunt held up printing the Folio to see it through. While not of such earth-shaking significance in the history of literature, William Burton’s Description of Leicestershire deserves its more limited fame as one of the early pioneers in English local history. Burton devoted twenty-five years’ work to his project. It was based on detailed local research and written with a critical eye: he recorded the Roman inscriptions of Leicestershire and even went to the trouble of issuing a carefully corrected copy of Saxton’s pioneering map of the shire. Burton had also studied the earlier travellers: William of Worcester, who wrote about England in the middle of the fifteenth century, and above all Henry VIII’s antiquary, John Leland, the troubled and driven genius who journeyed round England in the 1540s, and whose itinerary is the raw and unmediated forerunner of all topographical accounts of England – an unrivalled description of the country, though not destined to be published till modern times. Burton was responsible for saving some of Leland’s manuscripts, which he gifted to the Bodleian in Oxford. Also there are copies of his own notebooks, among them densely scribbled transcripts of now lost Leicester sections of Edward I’s 1279 Hundred Rolls Survey, an even more detailed account of England than William the Conqueror’s Domesday – including accounts of the Kibworths and Smeeton Westerby which have never been published. Obsessive as perhaps all the best local antiquarians are, Burton revised his book through his later life, constantly gathering information for planned future editions. He also contemplated three different parish histories – perhaps the first of their kind – of his native Lindley, of Dadlington and of Theddingworth near Kibworth. None of these ever saw the light of day though their notes would be invaluable to all later searchers.
Burton’s work was not in fact the first. Strictly speaking county history began with William Lambarde’s Perambulation of Kent, a work Burton generously recognized as ‘hard to overpraise’. Lambarde began writing in 1570, the year in which as far as we know the first British cartographer, Christopher Saxton, commenced work on his great atlas of the English counties – the first national atlas. Lambarde’s Kent was published in 1576 and with it detailed exploration of England began. Though in recent times there has been much argument about the extent and significance of Romanization of the country, the point of view of these early researchers was to see English and British history as an organic whole and Roman civilization as one of the roots of England. This was especially the theme of William Camden’s Britannia, a study of Britain and Ireland county by county which was first published in Latin in 1586. Camden said his aim was ‘to restore antiquity to Britain and Britain to its antiquity’ and he did so with the help of a network of correspondents without which any true antiquarian scholarship finds it hard to flower. Though printed in Latin, Camden’s book proved very popular, going through seven editions by 1607 (a remarkable testimony to the literacy and scholarship of his early-Stuart readership), and an English-language edition was published in 1610, spurring a wider range of readers.
Camden had called his work ‘chorography’ – the word derived from the Greek choros – ‘place’ – and Camden got it from the ancient geographer Ptolemy, who distinguished between geography as the study of the physical makeup of the whole world, or of large parts of it, and chorography, which looked at smaller parts, particular landscapes or places: ‘province, region, city or port’ as Ptolemy had put it. For Camden topography, geography, historical texts and monuments show how what we might call the givenness of the past is still discernible in the landscape and he inspired generations of on-the-ground searchers who combined antiquarianism and travel, a peculiarly English genre. He also attempted a first overview of the antiquities of Roman Britain. From then on England’s past from the prehistoric to the present would be seen as a continuum.
Camden then was the template for what followed: Carew’s Cornwall, Westcote’s View of Devonshire and then Burton’s Leicestershire in 1622. The focus of these and all later works was the English shire or, to use its Norman name, the county. The shire was an ancient Anglo-Saxon unit of organization, with its subdivisions into hundreds, manors, villages and parishes, and the English obsession with the shire is worth a moment’s pause. The shire has provoked intense loyalty in England, and still does, and it is not just a matter of cricket teams, still less of county councils and local administration. It is to do with the ways one defines oneself. For someone to say he or she is a Yorkshireman or Yorkshirewoman is to convey pride in a particular regional and cultural identity. The shire is still felt to be a real not an imaginary entity. Even now among the older generation in England the shire boundary – an obscure landmark it may be, an ancient ridgeway perhaps, a Roman road, or a Dark Age earthwork, a sunken lane with its towering hedgerows – also represents a frontier on a mental map beyond which things are done differently. The furious reaction to Edward Heath’s abolition of Rutland in 1974 showed the level of feeling about such local identities. Rutland was the smallest shire and the one perhaps with the least-evident markers of ancient identity, but it was Anglo-Saxon nonetheless (and for all we know very much earlier, perhaps of the Iron Age). The roots of England’s shires are often as old: back in the Viking Age the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle speaks of the ‘men of Devon’ or the ‘men of Hereford’ marching out to defend their land and support their king. Some shires overlie pre-Roman Iron Age tribal divisions and almost all were in existence by the tenth century. Along with the boroughs they were the essential unit of local administration, with their functions in justice, crime and punishment, and defence, and because they were the focus for local representation, over time they created intense loyalties. Even now, though the hundred lost its last judicial functions in the 1850s, the shires are often still the unit of local government, and still give their names to sports teams, societies and clubs. They are a focus of local sensibility. Never so diverse as the regions of France, nonetheless the deep identity of the ‘pays’ of England in custom, food, farming and dialect often reaches back into prehistory. Village, parish and shire underlie the country, and the shire came first.
The golden age of English chorography was between the late seventeenth and late eighteenth centuries, when learned antiquarian societies were formed and some of the great county histories were published. The greatest of all was John Nichols’s History and Antiquities of the County of Leicester. Nichols was a London printer who collaborated with Abraham Farley on his landmark 1783 printing of Domesday Book, which he rightly called ‘the most invaluable as well as the most antient Record in this or any other kingdom’. Nichols devised the typeface to render as closely as possible the script and marginalia and abbreviations of the Great Domesday manuscript. This contribution was a source of lasting pride to him; he would later say ‘on the correctness and the beauty of this important Work I am content to stake my typographical credit.’ Farley and Nichols’s Domesday has been justly called the greatest publishing venture in British history, and is also one of the most beautiful books ever printed. But at the same time Nichols was gathering materials for the most ambitious of all county histories. In four huge volumes (published in eight parts) he described Leicestershire parish by parish, drawing on a vast network of informants at parish level, on personal autopsy, on Burton’s unpublished notes and transcripts, and on a mass of historical manuscripts and antiquarian literature. Nichols included finely engraved illustrations of churches and monuments, coins and sculptures, Roman mosaics and inscriptions, and even (a first, this) the contents of Anglo-Saxon pagan graves: belt buckles, sword blades and cruciform brooches – all engraved with forensic precision. In Kibworth he illustrated the church and its monuments, and even reproduced the Roman gold coin of the Emperor Julian found in 1723. Another path-breaking achievement for its time, his prefatory volume summarized what was then known about the Romans, and laid before his readership the full text of the Domesday folios for the shire which Nichols had prepared with Farley. Paid for by public subscription this vast undertaking amounted to 5,600 folio pages – 5 million words – and would surely be unthinkable today. It has many errors of course, but its vast assemblage of material, though uneven in its scholarship by today’s standards, was an indispensable tool for the searcher after the history of Middle England. He taught them, and us, where, and how, to look.
As Nichols was publishing his early volumes in the 1790s another great source of knowledge was rapidly developing in the study of English antiquity, namely, maps. The mapping of England had started with Saxton’s pioneering maps in the 1570s, and along with tithe maps, estate plans and enclosure awards maps are an unrivalled source of local detail where they survive. Much of the detailed place name evidence in this story is derived from the wonderful estate maps of Kibworth Harcourt, starting in 1609, which are kept today in Merton College, Oxford, along with the tithe maps of Kibworth Beauchamp and Smeeton now held in the archives in Leicester and Lincoln. These often preserve precious details of Viking, Saxon and even pre-Roman Celtic field names passed down in local speech by the villagers. Nichols had produced finely drawn and coloured maps for each of the county’s hundreds, but cartographically speaking everything was changed by the creation of the Ordnance Survey, which began work in 1791, and published its first one-inch map (of Kent) in 1801. By the 1830s the whole of England had been mapped, and by the 1840s also in the scale of six inches to the mile. Later still, in the 1860s, a twenty-inch scale series followed, among the most beautiful and informative maps ever made. No searcher after the villages parishes and shires of England can do without them, and given the massive changes in the English landscape over the last seventy years, even the old cloth-backed one-inch tourist maps of the 1920s and 1930s have now become valuable – even haunting – historical sources in conveying the pattern of the countryside before the full onset of urbanization, motorways and industrialized agriculture in our own time.
Such topographical and textual explorations led to the founding of learned societies, beginning in 1717 with the London Society of Antiquaries, at whose early meetings some of the finds at Kibworth were first discussed and examined. During the nineteenth century local historical societies were founded in practically every county (an honourable mention here is due to the solitary forerunner, the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society of 1710), a veritable explosion of county and town history societies who met regularly to discuss and publish finds in their annual journals. It was as if social change in the Victorian age was now so visible and so sweeping, with urban society expanding everywhere, that the investigation of antiquity had suddenly grown urgent and intensive in response; as if in an age of irrevocable change – as their past began to recede from them at an ever faster rate – the English were gripped by the impulse to explore and examine themselves. Supplemented by gazetteers, by parish and village histories, Murray’s Handbooks, and the massive and still ongoing Victoria County History in 1899 – the greatest single publishing venture in English local history – and taken up by moderns like Arthur Mee, Nikolaus Pevsner and W. G. Hoskins, the flood shows no sign of stopping.
Finally a further crucial development in our understanding of the local past should be mentioned here: the founding of the English Place Name Society after the First World War. This great project, which is still under way, aimed to provide scholarly accounts of the history and derivation of all place names in every shire, parish, village and hamlet, even recording field names from tithe maps. Often recorded in different forms over many centuries, place names carry a special wealth of information. A subject till then (and still sometimes even now) plagued by false etymologies, amateur scholarship and local patriotism was able to achieve clarity and accuracy. Leicestershire is lucky here in that it is the subject of some of the society’s most recent and authoritative publications, incorporating the very latest onomastic and philological knowledge. The pages of the Leicester volumes are a treasure trove of fascinating and even at times astounding information, from medieval sacred wells, canal wharves and bargemen’s pubs to ancient field names, and, as it must for any town or village in England, the study of place names underpins the whole of the early part of this narrative.
The first finds
Such then are the tools for the seeker after local history. In Kibworth the first clues emerged in the early eighteenth century and were recorded by the assiduous Nichols. In 1723 a beautiful gold coin of the emperor Julian (who died in 363) was turned up in the street in Kibworth Beauchamp (one of only two that have been found in Britain). Then in 1730 a Roman stone inscription in Latin was found in the village (but since tantalizingly lost without ever being recorded). Around the same time a hoard of Roman coins was excavated, though Nichols reports ‘since gone out of the county’ (perhaps this was the fourth-century hoard reported in the minutes of the London Society of Antiquaries from ‘near Leicester’, comprising 600 bronze coins of Diocletian, Maximian, Maxentius and Constantine the Great). In 1788 building labourers having demolished the old rectory were digging new foundations in the vicar’s garden south of the church when ‘about a yard below the surface they discovered several pieces of Roman pottery in perfect preservation.’ What subsequently happened to these urns or jars is not known – they do not appear to have survived or been illustrated – but it sounds very much as if the workers had unearthed part of a Roman cemetery. From these finds the first hints had emerged that though the village is first recorded in 1086 in Domesday Book, and is unknown to the Roman geographers and itineraries, like so many places in England, it had a much longer prehistory.
The excavation of 1863
In Kibworth that history came vividly to life in 1863 when a remarkable excavation took place in the village. The story was reported in the newspapers and in the minutes of the new county historical society, but has been curiously ignored since and is still surrounded by mystery. The various accounts are a little confused, but several clear facts emerge from which a tentative picture may be drawn. The dig evidently took place at two separate locations. First was a low burial mound of the Bronze or Iron Age out on the Leicester road: a circular tumulus surrounded by a ditch, on which a post windmill had been erected in the thirteenth century. At the same time inside Kibworth Harcourt, behind the gardens and inns on Main Street, excavators cut a massive trench into a much bigger mound known locally as the Munt. There are many village stories about the Munt. It has been variously described as Iron Age, Roman, Viking and Norman, and one nineteenth-century villager claimed that it was the grave of a legendary Celtic king called Cibbaeus who had ‘come to the village from Wales’. (Intriguing as this story might appear, it is probably no more than a nineteenth-century antiquarians’ tale. The eponymous Cybba who gave his name to the village was as we shall see evidently Anglo-Saxon.)
The Munt is now tucked behind a row of eighteenth-century cottages and a former coaching inn, the Admiral Nelson, which is now converted into the Boboli pizza restaurant. A big eroded grassy mound spread over a few hundred square yards where sheep graze in the summer and children play in the winter with their toboggans in the snow, it has seen many events in the village story, including a memorable scene in 1936 when Ellen Wilkinson addressed the Jarrow marchers and a crowd from both ‘radical’ and ‘county’ Kibworth. It is likely that in its final phase the Munt was the motte of an earth and timber Norman castle erected in the immediate aftermath of the Norman Conquest when there was severe fighting in this part of Leicestershire. But the Victorian excavation suggested that the mound had a more ancient and complex history. It had first been opened in 1810, when the London–Harborough road was rerouted on a new by-pass round the village to save mail coaches hitting the corner house on the tight bend on Main Street. The road was driven through open ground close to the motte and removed much of what must have been an outer bailey. In the 1840s further finds which are now lost were exhibited in Leicester. But in 1863 the Munt was dug again when the newly formed county Historical Society picnicked on the spot and were treated to a learned lecture on the finds. This time the dig was a more scientific affair, though by modern standards it was still swift and brutal; but the finds caused something of a sensation in local antiquarian circles.
In the summer of 1863 a deep trench was cut through one side of the Munt and reached undisturbed black soil some nine feet below the surface. At the bottom was a cist grave, whose sides were lined with paving stones, containing burnt materials including bones, teeth, a bone bodkin and a decayed iron candelabrum. Fragments of Samian ware pottery were recognized as Roman, and perhaps date the grave to the late first or second century AD. The presence of some kind of lamp stand or oil lamp holder is especially interesting as such artefacts are depicted in fine wall paintings recovered more recently from a Roman house in Leicester; as a holder for Roman clay oil lamps this piece of ironwork then might have been hung on a chain, or stood on a tripod in the burial chamber.
Scrutinizing the 1863 accounts, for all their vagueness of description, modern archaeologists think they describe a Romano-British burial, and evidently of someone of importance in the colonial period, perhaps a member of the aristocracy of the Corieltauvi: a local potentate, then, or a prince. (In Roman Britain, as elsewhere in the empire, the main colonial landowning class in the countryside would usually be made up of descendants of the late-Iron Age native aristocracy.) Most likely then a British chief of the Corieltauvi tribe had been buried under the mound at Kibworth. Could the village have been the centre of an Iron Age ‘royal’ estate? Would this account for the recent metal detector finds of gold and silver staters of the Corieltauvi? The Munt clearly deserves proper excavation with modern techniques, but even through the 1863 discoveries an unexpected window opens up, however indistinctly, on local British society under Roman rule – and of course on the beginnings of the village story.
Further clues
In the late twentieth century further clues began to emerge. Over the last few decades Roman finds have turned up in a number of places in the village. Most intriguing is the discovery at the windmill mound by the A6 of a bronze coin of Constantine, along with Roman pottery, wall plaster chunks with keying, and fragments of Roman roofing tile, one still bearing the paw print of a dog. These were excavated by an indefatigable local engineer and archaeologist called Bert Aggas, who was painstaking and accurate in recording his finds. He even questioned villagers in the hope of gathering more information on chance finds that might shed some light on their past. Aggas found more sherds of Samian (the fine burnished orange-brown posh tableware dating from the first to second century). But he also found little square stone tesserae from a mosaic floor, and battered and broken chunks of several hand-querns: strong hints that a substantial Roman farm building lay somewhere nearby. The Roman pottery was scattered across the site underneath the grassed-over ridges, but not in the furrows, of the medieval field, which had evidently never fallen out of use till it was enclosed by Act of Parliament in 1789. Had the village fields then been continuously farmed since Roman times?
On the basis of these finds the area round the windmill mound field was targeted in the summer of 2009 with field-walking by villagers and archaeologists and scanned using magnetometry by the Hallaton group who had discovered the Hallaton treasure. On the first morning the Roman villa was located close to the windmill mound and by the close of the weekend the group had recovered its complete ground plan a hundred yards square. Built perhaps in the late first or second century, the Kibworth villa had been nothing palatial like the huge villas of the Cotswolds or the south coast, Fishbourne, say, or Chedworth. It was a simple working farm with an entrance gateway and central courtyard flanked by ancillary buildings, probably at first in indigenous-style mud brick and timber-framed halls with courtyard verandas, barns and animal sheds. Later it was probably rebuilt in stone, with floor mosaics composed of stone and pot tesserae, and perhaps bath houses for the owner and the workers (the spring or well that fed the villa is now lost but survives in the field name Banwell – Bana is an Anglo-Saxon male personal name). Around the villa the magnetometry survey also found evidence for the indigenous population: a late-Iron Age community of round huts, with rectangular animal enclosures. Still more recently metal detector finds have added further detail to this picture: a few hundred yards from the villa site coins of the Corieltauvi have been found, including magnificent gold and silver staters from the first century BC or early first century AD – just before the Roman Conquest. These coins are similar to ones found in the Hallaton treasure, whose links with other parts of Britain (including coins of Cunobelinus of Colchester) and Gaul show that even before the Roman Conquest the people of the Kibworth area had wider contacts, and perhaps even traded with the empire.
All this proved that there was already a community here when the Romans came. Along with the grand burial mound, the gold and silver coins might also hint at the presence of British persons of high status after the Conquest. The finds showed too that the place continued as a thriving estate whose people cultivated the land and used coins until the very end of the Roman period. (Recent metal detector finds, along with several Roman dress brooches, include copper coins from the second century in Kibworth Beauchamp, and three fourth-century coins from Kibworth Harcourt.) The latest pottery finds now include fine black wheel-made ware from the back yards of the ‘City’ (a cluster of workers’ cottages from the Industrial Revolution) and abraided Samian from the garden of one of the Victorian villas near the church. Bearing in mind the likely cemetery in the rectory garden, these discoveries suggest an area of Roman settlement about a kilometre and a half across – pretty much defining the land where human settlement has clustered ever since.
Topography of the village
So by chance – and much of it in the last year or two – traces of an older history have appeared, and although a blank for so long, a picture of the place long before 1066 has begun to emerge. Here ancient Britons, Romans, Saxons and Vikings with a continuity of society dwelt for at least 2,000 years. This story of course can be paralleled in many English villages, each one reflecting the national story, but each one unique in its own particular local detail. In all of them the first facts of village history are soil and water. From prehistory till now human settlement has been determined by the local environment out of which people have made a living, and fed, housed and clothed themselves and their families. Humans first settled in Kibworth because of the good grazing land and the spring line along the Jurassic Way. In Merton College the tithe map of 1609 marks no fewer than seventeen wells within the village of Kibworth Harcourt alone. These springs (so locals say) have never dried up, and they still flow today. The municipal piped water supply only came after the Second World War, and the last local to accept the new-fangled innovation of taps did not do so until 1976. Most of the old wells are still to be found behind the houses. In Kibworth Beauchamp the Tudor manor house still has a pump in its kitchen and in Harcourt the village pump (though its handle no longer works) still stands on the street by the wall at the Jubilee gardens. Older villagers remember that in the 1920s and 1930s each farmhouse had its own well. Betty Ward for example, who was born in 1921 in Priory Farm (an early-Tudor farmhouse), recalls: ‘Ours was a deep well at the farm, very deep and very dangerous. We used to pump the water from that well and it never let us down.’
These springs are the reason for the placing of the villages. The settlements at Kibworth and Smeeton lie on boulder clay soils and (in the case of Harcourt) partly on a sandy gravel bed dotted with springs. They lie between the shallow valleys of two important stream systems in central England – to the north the Soar and its tributaries, which flow into the Trent, and to the south the Welland, which flows east into the Wash. The low rise (it is scarcely a ridge) on which Kibworth stands forms a watershed between these two systems. From Kibworth two streams flow down to the Welland. One is called Langton Brook and rises in the Kibworth village springs; the other is near an ancient junction of country tracks north of Kibworth called Three Gates. It is unnamed on today’s Ordnance map but appears on earlier estate maps as Langton Caudle – in Anglo-Saxon the ‘cold well’ or ‘cold spring’. But in medieval documents, according to the Tudor traveller John Leland, and till recently in local speech, it was the Lipping. There is no other Lipping today in England, but the name is still found on the other side of the North Sea in Schleswig, in the ancestral lands of the Anglo-Saxon settlers who came here after the fall of Rome, in the district of Angeln, the place which gave its name to the Angles and to England. Unnoticed by the traffic that speeds south towards Northampton, there is a connection with the early-English migration into these parts in the fifth or sixth century.
On the northern side of the parish another stream, the Burton Brook, flows into the valley of the River Sence, which skirts the edge of Wistow and Kibworth parishes and joins the Soar south of Leicester. This river the Celts called the Glen. This name may derive from the Welsh word for valley; but the early forms of the name make it more likely that it comes from the Welsh word glano, meaning ‘sweet or good-flowing water’. This is what Sence means in Anglo-Saxon: the Anglo-Saxon immigrants in the Dark Ages then simply translated the local Welsh river name into their own speech as Sence: which in Old English has the connotation of ‘holy’ or ‘clean’ water (the word could even be used in the sense of a cup or draught of pure water). So the Anglo-Saxon word replaced the Welsh; but the British name has survived in today’s village names of Great Glen and Glen Parva, at opposite ends of the same stream. Glen indeed may conceivably have been the name of the whole Roman estate covering our village, as remembered still in the ninth century when the King of the Mercians held his court next door to Kibworth aet Glenne.
So though this early in the tale we cannot yet piece together a coherent ‘chorographical’ narrative, let alone the tale of individual lives, with these disparate fragments the story begins to take shape and an ancient landscape begins to come to life. The pre-Roman river names spoken by the Iron Age tribe here, the Corieltauvi, survived and came down to us; names from the deep past which are still spoken though their significance is forgotten. Though modern genetic studies show the lowest percentage of the ancient British DNA occurs in a band across from East Anglia into this part of the East Midlands, reflecting perhaps the track of the most intensive Anglo-Saxon migrations after the fall of Rome, yet it still represents two thirds of the lowland British population as a whole. This can only be at best a rough guess, but it is an indicator. It is very likely that in the main the ancient British population survived here too, underneath the overlay of Germanic newcomers who were fairly rapidly assimilated. Today the people speak modern English, which is derived from Anglo-Saxon, the incomers’ speech; Anglo-Saxon and Viking place names dominate in the village fields and lanes; but behind it all lie the ancient Britons, and sometimes even here there are names of Celtic origin. For example, in one of the great open fields in Kibworth Beauchamp one big furlong was known to Kibworth farmers as the Gric or Grig. In local speech one spoke of going as far as ‘the Gric Meare’ (or boundary), or of going ‘up on Grig’ or ‘along Grig’. This word comes from creig, meaning ‘hill’ in primitive and modern Welsh, and was perhaps left by British-speaking people whose coins are still found in Kibworth fields and whose language must have still been spoken here in the early Anglo-Saxon period. Such indigenous names for landmarks and fields were part of the mixed speech of the Dark Ages (when it was still possible even in the early eighth century to hear Welsh spoken not far away in the fens on the edge of Northamptonshire.) In the story of England this layering of culture, language and custom on to much older, and often unseen, identities will be a recurring theme in our account: part of the mysterious crystallization which shapes the life of every community over time.