In the seventh and eighth centuries, like many villages in England, Kibworth emerges as a defined place and perhaps as a community: very likely this is when it got its name. The difficulty for the historian is that, as for most places in England at this time, any narrative still has to be composed from a virtually total lack of evidence, though the village dig in 2009 furnished a few significant clues. This period of the village story represents a horizon of change in which societies and economies in the West begin to pick up after the breakdown of the Roman world. The popular view is that the Dark Ages were a very hard time for ordinary people, most of whom were engaged in a lifelong battle against want, working first to feed their betters and then themselves, with the ever-present threat of famine, plague and war. This, one suspects, is by and large true. But brutal times are often also, out of sheer necessity, times of creation. And the roots of many rural and urban communities in England grew in this period.
The slow signs of recovery in the seventh and eighth centuries were brought about by that great institution of the Dark Ages: kingship. Chronicles and poems may sometimes give the impression that kings spent their time fighting battles, raiding, exacting tribute, hunting and feasting in the royal hall while bards sang their praises. But the law codes – one of the distinctive creations of the Barbarian West – tell another story. English law codes of the seventh century show that as soon as they came under the influence of the Church, Anglo-Saxon kings were expected to adapt the heroic warrior ethos of their ancestral Germanic tradition to the Christian moral universe. A king should not only be a ‘plunder lord’ and ‘ring giver’ but also look after the people, protect them against violence and want, and promote Christian religion. These ideals did not always sit easily with traditional Germanic kingship – winning battles, exacting tribute and gaining ‘everlasting glory’, as the poets of the Dark Ages put it. But there were many advantages to a king in joining in a Christian order with fellow kings and from the late seventh century the first signs of improvement in material life are shown by widespread evidence of trade, with the movement of pottery and coins. In the 2009 dig the first sherds were found in the village of high-status Ipswich ware pottery and of the tiny coins known as sceattas. Minted in their millions from the late 600s these coins are a clear sign of the growth of trade routes from the rich eastern seaboard, and from established royal trading ports or wics, such as Ipswich and London (Lundenwic). Another important emporium was ‘Saltwich’, the former Roman salt-making centre at Droitwich, what the Mercian charters called the vico emptorio salis with its coveted salt houses and furnaces spread over twenty or thirty outlying villages. Producing one of the essentials of life, this was one industrial centre from the Roman Empire (and it cannot have been the only one) which may have continued to function uninterrupted through the Dark Ages. In the eighth century salt ways spread out from it across southern England, including one that passes on the old ‘Jurassic’ track through Kibworth and Tur Langton.
But it is likely that life lived in the eighth century was nasty, brutish and short. The annals of the time are dotted with disasters: plague, cattle murrains, smallpox, even hurricanes. In the village the dry summer of 719 was followed by torrential rains and floods in 720. The period of drought and famine from the late 730s and early 740s culminated in 741, when ‘the land bore no fruit.’ The wet year of 759 inaugurated two years of pestilence and sickness, which caused havoc among the poor – especially in a virulent outbreak of enteric dysentery. The heat wave of summer 783 presaged more weather disruption with heavy snows later in the decade. All these phenomena were devastating to pre-industrial societies.
Hard times: Kibworth in winter 762
The event which stayed sharpest in the memory of most people in the eighth century was the severe winter of 762–3, which is recorded in annals across Britain and Ireland. There had been great snowfalls in each of the previous three winters, starting in 760: a pattern which had already precipitated famines. Now ‘there was a truly immense snowfall, and the thick snow hardened into ice, such as no one had ever seen before.’ According to Northumbrian annals ‘the snowfall oppressed the land from the beginning of winter’ (religious calendars generally note this as starting on 21 November with ‘the start of freezing frosts’, but perhaps a later date is meant), ‘almost till the middle of spring’. Irish observers agree that the ‘great snow’ stayed on the ground for three months creating ‘great scarcity and famine’. The cold was so severe that ‘many trees and plants withered, and even many marine animals were found cast up dead on frozen estuaries.’
In response to the big freeze people struggled as best they could to keep warm, and that same winter ‘towns, monasteries and villages in various districts and kingdoms were all at once devastated by fire,’ says a Northumbrian annalist, ‘for instance the calamity struck Stretburg, Winchester, Southampton, London, York, Doncaster and many other places.’ The result of people lighting fires in the extreme cold to keep warm, this is a vivid indicator of the bitter conditions of winter in the early Middle Ages. And, as with the mini-Ice Age of the 1310s, extreme winters were followed the next summer by scarcity, famine and an abnormally severe drought. Bread shortages are widely reported across Britain and Ireland. Such disasters in a subsistence society hit the peasantry hardest and the aftermath – in starvation, infant mortality, poor health and failed crops – must have been prolonged. For the scattered thatched mud huts along the low ridge where the village now stands, it was mostly a simple matter of survival. Sunset was early on those winter nights above the valley. In the law codes’ brief glimpses of the peasants’ existence, the villages shone as tiny pinpricks of light in a surrounding sea of darkness. There were wolves in the forests and the lonely horn of a traveller out late must alert the villagers to where he is for fear of being attacked as an intruder. Inside the houses lit by guttering oil lamps, those long cold dark nights were perhaps a time for songs, stories and poetry and for news of a wider world from a trader or returning pilgrim. And then early to bed. Another night in eighth-century England.
The beginnings of Kibworth
How then did the scattered early-Anglian settlement above the valley of the Welland become an English village called Kibworth? The village story now takes us into the days of the kings of Mercia, who were the first to call themselves kings of all the English. And, as for any English village, along with the topography the place name contains a first vital clue to the history. The name Kibworth means the ‘enclosure’ – worthig in Old English – of a man called Cybba. Who was this Cybba? This Anglian name appears nowhere else though there are related forms in the Midlands such as Cubbel. But it resonates suggestively with names in the Mercian royal family, particularly the alliterating ‘P’ names and ‘C’ names in two branches of the royal pedigrees, such as Pybba, Penda, Peada, Peaga, Crida and Cnebba. Like Pybba, or the royal holy woman Tibba, Cybba is bisyllabic and hypocoristic, a shortened diminutive as a nickname or term of endearment. The name evokes what an eighth-century writer called the ‘noblest line of the Middle Angles’, which could be counted back ‘step by step’ to Icil in the migration era. People had long memories in the Dark Ages and many Mercian nobles by the eighth century could trace their royal descent, however distant. Perhaps then Cybba belonged to a minor branch of the royal tree: a man who in the heyday of the Mercians in the eighth century was gifted his own estate by the king himself.
The second part of the name, ‘worth’, common as it is in England today, may also be surprisingly significant. Settlements’ names involving ‘worth’, though frequent in Old English charters, only start to appear from about 730. And some early ones in Mercia are of high status, like Brixworth with its magnificent royal church, the royal estate of Bosworth, or Northworthy, the old name of Derby, the ‘capital’ of the North Mercians. At an early stage the word seems to have developed a meaning akin to burh, ‘a fortified place’. Tamworth, the royal ‘capital’ and ancient centre of the South Mercians, changed its name from Tomtun (‘the tun of the dwellers on the River Tame’) in the early eighth century to Tomeworthig, when Mercian kings encircled it with a defensive enclosure, which has been excavated by modern archaeologists. Whether Anglo-Saxon Kibworth was just a ditched demesne farm or whether it actually had a defensive enclosure is not known, though a village ditch survives at Harcourt enclosing an area comparable to the Tamworth defences. In seventeenth-century maps the village still nestles inside this circuit, with its houses, tofts and gardens, the boundary defined by a hedge and ditch and a line of medieval fishponds.
Though no document has survived to tell us about the history of Mercian Kibworth, and though topography and archaeology are all we have on which to build our picture, we may guess an eighth-century date for ‘the enclosure of Cybba’. This would have been the lord’s residence, but attached to it just to the south may have been a village of dependent serfs which in time would become Kibworth Beauchamp. The crafts and artisanal skills which went with such a noble estate in the Dark Ages were provided by the village of metalworkers at the ‘smiths’ tun’, Smeeton, perhaps servicing both Cybba’s estate and the royal residence at Gumley, ‘Godmund’s wood’, a mile to the south. In the later Anglo-Saxon period the king himself retained part of Smeeton, and another royal hall lay on the River Glen two miles to the west. These royal centres were visited by the kings on their itineraries and must have loomed large in the lives of the Kibworth peasants who provided food supplies not only for their lord, but also for the royal feasts when huge numbers of royal courtiers and guests had to be fed.
As for Cybba himself, if the land was formally given to him as with other royal land leases of the eighth century, then we need only a little imagination to picture this founding moment. The scene is the royal hall at the vicus regius and hunting lodge of Gumley on the south border of Kibworth parish, where the Mercian kings Offa and Aethelbald held court several times at the height of their empire between the 740s and 780s. It is still a closed village today and thick woods still cover the hill where the Mercian kings hunted with hawks and hounds and speared wild boar. The king now is Aethelbald, a grizzled veteran, masterful and violent like most Dark Age kings, who owes his power to coming out on top in internecine feuds (and indeed he was eventually assassinated by his own bodyguard). Aethelbald may well be the king depicted in full powers on the recently discovered Repton stone sitting on a prancing warhorse with its docked tail, carrying a short shield, a flat bladed sword and a seax – the Anglo-Saxon short dagger – his stern face with big moustaches the very image of a Germanic king of the Dark Ages, ‘plunder lord, deed doer, ring giver, leader of men’.
In the hall are assembled kinsmen, sub-kings, the bishops of Lichfield and Worcester, some of the ealdormen of the tribes of the Middle Angles, and the thegns and companions, some of whose names we know: Peada, Ofa and Cusa. Present too are noble hostages from other kingdoms for that is how kings ruled outside their stemland: through military force, the exaction of tribute, the taking of hostages. The king himself was very likely illiterate, but his royal clerk impersonates him with high-flown titles, in Latin:
I Aethelbald by God’s gift king not only of the Mercians but also of all the provinces which go by the name of ‘South English’; for the good of my soul and the remission of my sins, freely grant to my faithful companion or minister, Cybba, a certain piece of land, namely twenty-five hides in the province called by men of old ‘Middle Angles’, by the river called aet Glenne with all perquisites belonging to it, fields, woods and meadow … and if anyone try to violate this gift let him know he will make reckoning to God on the great day of judgement. This charter is written in the year of our Lord 736 in the royal vill of Gumley in the province of the Middle Angles. I Aethelbald king of Britain confirm my own donation with the sign of the cross …
To this the scribe would have added a note on whether Cybba was free to bequeath his estate to any of his kin, and specifying the customary burdens on the estate: whether for example it was free of all secular dues except the customary road repairs and bridge and fortress construction, or military service. Perhaps the land of the lord (known as the inland) was farmed by unfree peasants for the lord’s own profit; and the free peasants (on what was known as warland) could sell their surplus but were liable for taxes and military service. As for the population of Kibworth in the eighth century, its tax assessment in later times (without Smeeton) was twenty-five hides: the hide of 120 acres being traditionally land enough to support one family. In reality the land had to support far more people in later Anglo-Saxon times, but if the assessment bears any relation to reality, then that might indicate that between a hundred and 150 people could have lived there in Cybba’s day.
In return for this gift of land Cybba might have had to pay the king annual rent. This could have been in silver coin, or war gear, or in horses and tack, the things a king constantly needed to replenish in order to reward and expand his armed following. But as important royal estates lay next door to Kibworth at Gumley and Glen, the rents are more likely to have been in kind, to feed the court with the surplus produced by the Kibworth peasants. A contemporary text gives us details of the food rent for a ten-hide estate:
10 vats of honey, 300 loaves, 12 ambers of Welsh ale, 30 of clear ale, full grown cows or 10 wethers, 10 geese, 20 hens, 10 cheeses, an amber full of butter, 5 salmon, 20 pounds of fodder [= about 500 bushels]and 100 eels.
As well as feeding and sustaining their lord Cybba, then, the unfree Kibworth peasants would have had to provide food supplies for the king when he was in residence with his court next door.
Cybba’s charter would also have briefly delineated the bounds of the land given and the rights to pasturage and timber. No early charters survive in this part of the East Midlands, but if all Kibworth was originally one estate (it had broken into several manors by the eleventh century) then the bounds would have been recorded in this way (some of these ancient boundaries survive in tithe maps of the eighteenth century, still using the old Anglo-Saxon word ‘mere’ for boundary): ‘These are the bounds of the estate at Cybba’s worth: first at the boundary of the ceorls’ tun [Carlton] along the Burton Brook by the boundary of the people of Glen to the wood at Godmund’s wood [Gumley] then from the boundary tree to the ford of the stream and then along the boundary of the people of Langton back to the brook at Carlton.’
Once this had been read out in the hall, the royal gift would be sealed with solemn oaths, with a symbolic piece of turf from the land placed on an open Gospel book. The charter was then copied twice on a sheet of vellum which was cut in two as a ‘chirograph’, the join in a sawtooth shape that could be fitted together to prove its authenticity. One half went to the king’s ‘halidom’, his relic box and treasury, which his Mass priests lodged in the cathedral archive at Lichfield; the other half went to Cybba himself to keep in his chest in his hall in Kibworth: to hold as the title to his ‘bookland’, lord of the settlement which from then on will bear his name.
With Cybba comes the beginning of a continuity of lordship: the association of Kibworth with lords who from the eleventh century can be named all the way through the later history of the village. The late-Saxon landlords Aelfric, Edwin and Aelfmaer, then the Normans, William the Conqueror himself, Hugh Grandmesnil and Roger of Busli who fought with him at Hastings, and after them the Harcourts and the Beauchamps who gave their names to the two halves of the village. Later still there were the Earls of Warwick, the Plantagenets, the Dudleys and even briefly Elizabeth I herself, along with Merton College, Oxford, which still rents out the fields in Kibworth Harcourt today as it has since 1270. As with so many places in England, then, Cybba was the Anglo-Saxon owner who started the pattern of lordship, the tale of exploitation of the poor by the rich that has lasted until modern times. An important part of the narrative of English history is the story of how the rulers asserted and enforced their claim to the labour and surplus of the working people, and how the people fought to establish their own freedoms under the law. In Kibworth, thanks to the astonishing documentary record from the 1200s, that story can be told in detail over the centuries through the rent strikes of the early fourteenth century which loosed the bonds of feudal tenure, to the rise of the Tudor yeoman farming class, down to the Enclosure Act of 1789. In this way the English polity developed in a constant negotiation between rulers and ruled, workers and landlords: a negotiation which of course still continues today.
Tribes and kingdoms
For three centuries the lives of the people of the village were bound up with the politics and economy of the kingdom of the Mercians. In the eighth century their kings rose to be rulers of all the southern English, on their coins and charters claiming to be ‘Kings of the English’, and even lords of Britain. The Mercians ruled from the Welsh border to the Fens, and from the Humber to the Thames. Other ‘nations’ beyond their boundaries – the East Angles, West Saxons, Northumbrians and people of Kent – paid them tribute and acknowledged their overlordship. The centre of Mercian power was the Trent valley and their main royal centre at Tamworth (‘the enclosure on the Tame’) was the place where their kings gathered their fideles, their ealdormen and thegns, to celebrate the chief Christian feast days. Their name means the ‘border people’, referring most likely to the western frontier with the Welsh kingdoms: it was not an ethnic title; nor were they at all a homogeneous ethnic group. There were some thirty Mercian tribes speaking different dialects and languages, including Welsh. Their kings though called themselves Angles, and it is after them that England is called by that name today. One of the great problems in the early history of England is that contemporary sources are mediated by the West Saxons, the ultimate makers of England; but on the origins and hegemony of Mercia we are less well-informed. The Mercians were the most successful of the early English kingdoms; but because they lost out in the end to the kings of Wessex, a great part of their story was forgotten and is only now being recovered through manuscripts, coins, sculpture and recent finds, including the extraordinary late-seventh-century Staffordshire treasure.
The peoples between Leicester and the River Welland, including the villagers of Kibworth, were part of the loose confederation of tribes known as Middle Angles who lived in the Fens and the eastern Midlands between the East Angles and the Mercians proper (‘original Mercia’ as they said – who were notionally the ‘West Angles’). This huge region had fallen under Mercian lordship in the early seventh century in the course of extended conflicts between Mercians and the East Angles. No more than the Mercians were the Middle Angles of one ethnic identity: a grouping of many tribes and clans, they came to be viewed as a distinct regional grouping with their own borders and their own leaders – perhaps a distinct branch of the royal descendents of Icil. The process which brought them together is not known. The Middle Anglian tribes are evidently part of an older and now largely lost pattern of early English society but they probably emerged along the Fen edge between the East Angles and the Mercians of the Trent valley after the migration period. A mysterious tax assessment document known as the Tribal Hidage lists various tribes, including small peoples down the Welland in Northamptonshire as far as the Fens. Some of these were certainly within the Middle Angles but unfortunately the key tribal groupings in the East Midlands, Leicestershire and Rutland are still not identified.
There is one last thought as we consider Mercian origins and the foundation myths of the early English. The cultural contours of the Middle Angles with their mixed British and Anglian population seem to bear a close relation to the earlier Roman-British kingdom of the Corieltauvi. The Corieltauvi also appear to have been a loose federation of tribes with several rulers, and there is an apparent correspondence between the spread of coin and pottery finds of the Corieltauvi, and the distinctive Middle Anglian granitic-tempered pottery found between the Trent and the Welland in the Anglo-Saxon period. It would be fascinating to know whether the mix of indigenous people and an immigrant elite which developed in this region represents the continuance of an older regional identity – whether indeed the Middle Angles were actually in some sense a successor state of the Corieltauvi. But what such an observation might mean, it is as yet difficult to be sure.
The coming of Christ
The culture of the pagan Germanic tribes who had migrated to Britain in the Dark Ages was transformed by Christianity. By the time of Cybba in the eighth century, his region had been nominally Christian for two or three generations. Celtic Christianity had survived the fall of Rome in Ireland and Western Britain, and after Gregory the Great sent his mission from Rome to Kent in 597 under St Augustine Christianity began its triumphal progress among the elites of the early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. According to Bede’s famous story, the Gregorian mission of 597 began in a slave market in Italy where Gregory saw captive Angles waiting to be sold (vivid proof by the way of how easily violence and enslavement crossed frontiers at that time). So touched was the Pope by their fair looks that he remarked: ‘These are not Angles but angels.’ Immortalized by Bede, the story was loved by the English ever after – it made them almost a chosen people – and though there were many Anglo-Saxon tribes and language groups, thanks to Bede it was the Angles who gave England and the English their name.
The first rulers to convert were those of Kent in 597, then the East Angles in the 620s, the Northumbrians in 627, the West Saxons in 634 and finally the Mercians from the 650s onwards. These of course are the dates of the conversion of the royal families and their elites, not the mass of people, which took a lot longer. The narrative of this process was created by Bede in his History of the English Church and People completed in 731. His was an idealized and teleological narrative, but in practice in the remoter regions conversion was certainly not finished by the eleventh century – if indeed not later still. Bede’s own letters offer eye-opening insights into the conditions in the countryside of his own day, where what he calls ‘demon-worship’ was everywhere, sacred rocks and trees were widely worshipped and ‘there are many places that have not seen a bishop from one year to the next.’ The early Old English law codes show pagan beliefs were widespread in the countryside along with customs which we must assume were common to the villagers of Kibworth in the seventh century and indeed much later: pin sticking, voodoo, magical charms, bloodletting and animal sacrifice. The tariffs drawn up by the Church in the penitential manuals sent with missionaries into the field show such practices were found all the way through society from freemen to slaves: ‘If a husband sacrifice to devils … if a slave sacrifice to devils.’ Some of the folk cures for impotence and childbirth against which the orthodox railed – mixing blood or semen with food, for example – are still found in wilder parts of the globe today wherever traditional cultures have escaped the globalization of the mind.
This was the kind of thing the Church warred against for centuries but it was part of a deep matrix of belief in propitiation and auspiciousness which even now has never quite gone away. Though the narrative which has come down to us has been almost completely controlled and articulated by churchmen, such hints in the sources are a warning against accepting at their face value ‘official’ narratives which (as we shall see again in the Reformation) represent sweeping historical change simply as the consensual acceptance of a new thought-world by the ordinary people. In reality there is a wide gulf between learned theological belief on the one hand and popular religious practice on the other. What people actually do – their rituals of auspiciousness, their responses to childbirth, death, disease and suffering – these things are not always conditioned by theological belief, and they can take centuries to change.
Under the early Mercian kings the people of Kibworth were pagans who sacrificed to pagan gods and ‘revered stones and trees’ as Bede says. At the root of their religious practice was an animism similar to many polytheistic religions still in the world today. Near to Kibworth they had a sanctuary in a sacred wood or grove (leah) of the thunder god Thunor whose ‘Holy Oak’ is revealed in Domesday Book and in the much later place name Thunor’s Leah. The many local sacred wells and springs in the area were also adopted by the Christian Church when Christianity came to the Mercians after the death of the pagan Penda in battle in 655. The key figure in this was Penda’s son, King Wulfhere, ‘a man of proud mind and insatiable will’ who was long remembered as an ardent supporter of the Church. Under his aegis a small band of missionaries borrowed from Northumbria fanned out among the Middle Angles. In a wild countryside whose population was still largely pagan they founded wooden churches thatched with reeds ‘in the Irish fashion’, but at that point there were only three bishops for the whole of the gens Anglorum – a measure of the progress of conversion. It necessarily began on a small scale: the first missionaries were St Chad and three companions. A diminutive man, Chad favoured barefoot evangelizing like the early fathers, and he and his missionary monks established centres where they laboured like common men, ploughing and sowing as well as preaching, exemplars of the holy life. Later when the tough old Greek Archbishop Theodore of Tarsus travelled across England to draw up a progress report, not surprisingly he thought Chad’s admirably ascetic bent too slow, and he is said to have physically lifted the tiny and unassertive Chad on to a horse and told him brusquely to get on with it. Already seventy years old, Theodore was a man in a hurry: he had the gens Anglorum to convert.
St Wilfrid
It was perhaps at a wooden preaching cross in Kibworth in the late seventh century that Christianity was first preached to the ancestors of our villagers, on the low hill where the church of St Wilfrid was later built. But by whom precisely? The dedication of the church itself raises the interesting question as to whether the key figure who brought Christianity to the village was St Wilfrid himself. A very different character to the unassuming Chad, Wilfrid was a fractious Northumbrian monk who exploited his friendship and influence with the Mercian kings to the full – and not just for spiritual gain. Wilfrid’s special relationship with Wulfhere began in the late 660s when he was invited by the king to come down to Mercia where the king needed a bishop who could organize and get things done. In return Wulfhere rewarded Wilfrid with ‘many tracts of land’, on which Wilfrid according to his biographer ‘soon established minsters for the servants of God’. Later in the 690s Wilfrid worked as bishop among the Middle Angles perhaps in the old Roman city of Leicester. From here he sponsored missionary activity both in Mercia and abroad among the Angles’ continental cousins, the Frisians. Ambitious and worldly, a dedicated missionary, Wilfrid was a man who made enemies easily and endured more than one exile, but he was the dominant personality in the missionary activity among the Middle Angles in the late 690s and the first decade of the eighth century. Could this be why the church in Kibworth is dedicated to him?
Traces of Wilfrid’s presence have been detected north of the Humber in church dedications where tradition says he actually preached. In the East Midlands too there is an interesting cluster of Wilfrid dedications on the Trent near Newark, at pre-Conquest churches at Kirkby-in-Ashfield and Calverton, and at the Anglo-Saxon royal estate of Screveton just off Fosse Way. Not all are certainly early dedications but it is possible that some of these early churches mark places where Wilfrid preached and founded minsters at the behest of King Wulfhere. There are some faint hints that Kibworth church once had high status, and the Anglo-Saxon kings held land in part of the old parish. None of this adds up to more than speculation, but a Roman cemetery site and a sixth-century Anglian settlement at least offer the possibility that though Kibworth church is first recorded in the thirteenth century, it could have existed much earlier – and even that Wilfrid himself could have preached here to the Middle Angles.
The Christian narrative is so wedded to the English story, to English culture and, till only recently, to the English sense of identity that we have tended to think it was both inevitable and a good thing. That narrative has been composed by Christian scholars in monasteries and schoolrooms, from Bede in the eighth century to Winston Churchill in the twentieth. And of course some saw it that way, though others like King Penda no doubt agreed with the pagan Frisian king who at the last moment stepped away from the baptismal font saying he would rather spend the next life with his brave pagan ancestors, even though in hell, than with the pallid Christians in their heaven. The truth is that these were long-contested legacies, and Christianity brought by no means unqualified benefits to kings in the Dark Ages. Likewise the allure of the pagan religion of the ancestors has been underestimated by later writers: especially where it met the needs of auspiciousness, fertility and rites of passage (which Christianity, unable to erase, would absorb right across the world from the Andes to Orissa).
What counted above all for kings in the Dark Ages in a time of chronic instability and random violence was their ability to keep power, to win battles and to attract warriors with food, gifts and treasure. But royal clans were forever split by internecine feuds, kings were deposed and murdered by their own kinsmen as well as by their outside enemies. So what counted too was legitimacy. And as the power of the Church grew among the Germanic barbarians in the West, kingship was reshaped, extended and dignified, especially through the liturgies that conferred kingship as a divinely anointed office. The first great Mercian king, Penda, was a pagan but his sons and daughters were receptive to the new faith and ploughed their dynastic wealth into religion, establishing minsters on royal land and founding the great Mercian monasteries at Repton, Breedon and Peterborough. In later English history, the enormous wealth and resources diverted into the Church would lead to frequent tensions in the state, from the anti-monastic reaction in the tenth century to Henry VIII’s Reformation. And there would be tensions too about the Christian message itself and who should control and interpret it: this would be the subject of numerous bitter battles in English culture till the decline of religion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Kibworth dissenting traditions have been particularly strong from the Lollards in the fourteenth century to Congregationalists, Quakers, Methodists and other radicals right up to our own time. But from the eighth century until the twentieth English history to a greater or lesser degree will be Christian.
‘The terror of the Arabs’
Seen through the eyes of Bede, Cybba’s world looks like a threatening, unstable but undeniably exciting place. At the time Cybba made his enclosure at Kibworth and built his wooden hall, the English were no longer isolated or unaware of the outside world. As they always have been, they were inveterate travellers. Wilfrid himself went from Leicester to Rome simply to pursue a court case. Other intrepid Britons ‘versed in diverse far-away places’ reached the Holy Land bearing Greek–Latin phrase books and giving the lie to the idea that all English people are hopeless at other languages! In the Wirral evidence of such journeys turned up recently in a seventh-century Egyptian pilgrim flask showing St Menas of Alexandria in the sand on a Dark Age trading shore. Coins minted in the Caliphate came in merchants’ packs along with lapis lazuli from Afghanistan which would be ground up to adorn beautiful manuscripts created under the aegis of the Mercian kings.
Such contacts and exchanges were symptomatic of a time of profound historical change. The vacuum left by the collapse of the Roman Empire was filled in northern and Western Europe by the barbarians – Franks, Goths, Angles, Saxons. In the East, in the late seventh and eighth centuries, the Arabs became the great power in the Mediterranean. In Bede’s lifetime Muslim Arab armies had advanced into southern France, and up in Jarrow they heard the news: writing the year before the Muslim defeat near Poitiers, Bede spoke of the ‘gravissima saracenorum lues’, the high-water mark of an astonishing movement which took Islam westwards across North Africa to the shores of the Atlantic, and eastwards to the Indus. In the process, as Bede was well aware, the Arabs had overrun the Christian heartland of Syria and Palestine, with all the biblical holy places. Christianity’s intellectual powerhouses had gone too, like Alexandria, Edessa and Antioch – from where Theodore of Tarsus had begun the amazing journey that finally led him out to the wilds of Britain. The wooded countryside of Mercia with its thatched ‘Irish-style’ churches must have seemed to him a far cry indeed from the soaring dome of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople or the great basilica of his native Edessa (on whose flora and fauna he lectured his wide-eyed students at Canterbury, pausing to recall the mouth-watering Syrian melons, which he described as ‘rather like cucumbers but much bigger – the melons in Edessa are so big that a camel can scarcely carry two of them’).
The southern shores of the Mediterranean were now conquered by the Arabs, the Visigothic kingdom of Spain was overthrown and Constantinople manned its defences against Islam and hardened its Eastern orthodoxy against the Latins. No wonder that the popes in Rome, rebuffed by the Greek world, now looked north for help, money and new souls. To the papacy, underdeveloped northern Europe was a new world just as Latin America would be in the sixteenth century. This looking north is a characteristic of the age. It has been seen as a turning away from the Mediterranean world of late Antiquity, the beginning of a new Europe on the Atlantic seaboard, a shift in gravity from the old classical world round the shores of the Mediterranean ‘like frogs around a frog pond’ as Plato had put it. And indeed, as an Arab civilization was flowering across the Mediterranean, beyond the Alps, albeit at a much lower level of material achievement, a new northern civilization was beginning to emerge.
The village in the eighth century
In the eighth century the peasants of Kibworth, free and unfree, found themselves part of that civilization, under a lord protected by a great king, who proclaimed himself ‘King of the whole patria of all the English’. The Mercian kings were itinerant, constantly travelling their kingdom, always on the move, showing themselves to friends and foes alike, raising their food rents, bribing, rewarding, cajoling and threatening. Such was the reality of Dark Age rule. In documents of the eighth and ninth centuries we can see them staying on the royal estates around Kibworth, receiving ambassadors from Charlemagne who came to negotiate marriage alliances or to buy English woollen cloths woven and dyed in workshops in villages like Kibworth. English needlework and metalwork were also coveted, made in royal workshops like that at Smeeton close to the royal hall at Gumley above Kibworth. There the king was praised by poets for his royal deeds and his famous ancestry back to the legendary Offa of Angeln and the later kings who came across the sea, ‘overcame the Welsh’ and carved themselves a kingdom in Britain.
But in the background of these splendid feasts were the peasants of the village who provided meat, food and beer for the kings and their guests; who provisioned the kings’ huntsmen and their hawks and hunting dogs; and fed his horses and grooms. At Kibworth, chance finds have added colour to this picture: metalworkers’ slag, silver sceattas, and the Ipswich ware, which perhaps contained the salt carried on carts from the salt houses and furnaces at Droitwich. These were the first signs that even the peasants of Kibworth were touched by the slow rise of the Dark Ages.
The archaeological finds suggest that the three main villages that make up the old parish of Kibworth already existed before the ninth century. First was the lord’s ‘worth’, which will become Kibworth Harcourt. Inside the enclosure was the lord’s hall, his cookhouse and weaving huts, barns, stables, workshops and maybe a wooden chapel. His peasants had several ox teams, kept sheep, pigs and beehives. They had a communal bread oven and perhaps a horse mill as well as later a water mill on Langton stream. For protection from wolves and bandits there was the ditch. Harcourt is still partly surrounded by its early ditch – to the north-west and north-east the housing plots and gardens run away from the main road and end at the village hedge and fishponds. This formed a protection used throughout the Middle Ages, when there were bars on the entrances at night, all the more necessary no doubt in the violent world of the Dark Ages.
A few hundred yards to the south was the village of dependent peasants, unfree serfs and estate workers, which in time would become Kibworth Beauchamp. Surviving field names here suggest at least part of the village may have been owned by the king, in which case these serfs may originally have owed their labour to the royal estate at Gumley. Finally, in the south of the present parish, along a low ridge was the artisanal settlement of smiths and metalworkers at Smeeton. In material terms the life of the ordinary people must have been strikingly similar to the late-Roman and Dark Age estates (except that now Anglian not Welsh was spoken). Pigs, oxen, horses, hens, goats and geese were kept in all the villages. The houses of the better-off were on the rise near the church, while the serfs and cottagers dwelt by the stream where the railway now runs, or in the wet boggy land still called The Marsh whose inhabitants even in the nineteenth century lived in mud houses, their aching bones prone to rheumatism and malaria.
Such then was the beginning of ‘Cybba’s worth’. Historians can look at the coins and treasure and the illuminated manuscripts of the Mercian kings, and point to their achievements in creating order; the forerunner of the kingdom of England. But at the grass roots the view is very different. In England in the eighth century our community, like the bulk of the population, laboured to feed and sustain their betters, and only then themselves. Privation, disease and (especially in harsh winters like those of the 760s) hardship were their lot. Working with inadequate tools on thick clays our peasants were surrounded by a still wild landscape with great forests. Place names like Wolvey on Watling Street (owned by the last Saxon lord of Kibworth) point for example to the ubiquity of the wolf; the many ‘wolf pits’ to their lairs or the places where they were trapped. All this was a far cry from the glittering treasures massed in the royal hall, the kind of things described in their poems and discovered to our amazement in the Staffordshire hoard.
The sustainers of that heroic world, the villagers in the seventh and eighth centuries no doubt fell back on the comforts that are left to their like all over the globe: the soothsayer, the wise woman, the medicus, the gods of the countryside, the sacred wells, the tree of Thunor hung with prayers too, propitiations at the demons’ pit, coins and offerings thrown in Grendel’s Mere, prayers too to the saint in his shrine; while the nobles assiduously cultivated the new religion in a half Christian, half pagan world, in a conversion culture. Such times in so many ways are poised on the cusp of history, between the no longer and the not yet. One local nobleman from the ‘most distinguished line of the Middle Angles’, a man who had spent the last decade of the seventh century as a warrior in the king’s hall, turning his eye to the transitory nature of the world and to the end of time, left his family and withdrew to the fens south-east of the Welland where Welsh could still be heard among the eel trappers and basket makers. With Guthlac were his sister Pega and his kinswoman Tibba. Here, driven by the message of the early fathers, he began to ‘remake himself’ as Origen had said ‘in the hope that a better humanity would arise’. On an island in the fens he found his own wilderness, his paneremos, just as the early Christian hermits had chosen the Egyptian desert, and he lived out the rest of his life in that liminal landscape ‘neither land nor water’ where he heard demons and saw bears, boar and wild cats. His sister would even go on pilgrimage to find her final rest in Rome. For the peasants, as yet, there were no such choices. But in time – and sooner than might be imagined – they would come.