We're following the story of one place through the whole of English history,
from the Romans right up to the present day.
I found some teeth, three teeth...
Yeah?
And some Roman pottery... Yeah, Roman pottery, two pieces.
That is a piece of an Anglo Saxon bone comb. Around 500 maybe?
The place is Kibworth in Leicestershire, in the heart of England.
With archaeology, science and documents, we're trying to tell the story
of the ordinary English people.
Push that in, right foot on that pedal...
From open field farming to the coming of industry,
canals and railways.
We left Kibworth after the horrors of the Black Death
when two-thirds of the villages died.
Emma Cook, Agnes Polle, Robert Polle,
Mr Haines, John and Constance Sybil.
But from this time, changes begin in English society
which will eventually turn us into the first modern industrial nation.
So now we're going to take the story of the village on from the aftermath
of the Black Death to the age of the Tudors.
Now in the national narrative, this is the time of the Hundred Years' War and the Wars of the Roses,
but for the ordinary people of England,
much more important things were happening at grass roots level
in the rise of education, in money and jobs and mobility
and the beginnings of freedom of thought.
And all these things we can see working themselves out here in our village.
This is the time when the character of the English people as we would recognise it
begins to be recognisable for the first time.
In summer 1381, England was convulsed by revolution.
The Peasants' Revolt. With London swamped by peasant armies, the kingdom teetered on the brink.
The Peasants' Revolt had come out of the social upheavals following the Black Death.
With the population decimated by plague,
there was a surge of protest by ordinary people
against the labour laws, the class structure and the extravagance of the rich.
Here in Smithfield, the peasant leader Wat Tyler
confronted the young King Richard II,
with the peasants' demands for justice.
As the peasant armies rampaged across England,
one force arrived in Market Harborough, just south of Kibworth.
A local eye-witness tells the story.
"The rebels were expected next day at dawn," says Henry Knighton.
"Scouts were sent out on the road south
to try to find out where the rebels were and what they were doing.
"But none of them came back with either good news or bad.
"So men's hearts trembled with fear," says Knighton.
"And all they could do was await divine providence,
"without which nothing survives."
And divine providence must have seemed the only explanation for the peasants' defeat.
When their leader was murdered, his army lost their nerve and felt apart.
In the Midlands, the rebels never made it those last five miles to Kibworth.
But the changes demanded by the peasants would come whether the government liked it or not.
And as happens so often in history,
these changes came silently, not by violent revolution,
and the first crucial development was in education.
Hello. Good morning.
Robin knows that I'm coming, but can I get a day pass?
You can. That's great.
'Hints of how education might have begun in medieval Kibworth
'have recently turned up in Leicestershire county record office.
'As in every county in England, the office hold the local records,
'which we can all access to explore our history.
'And here they go back to the 1100s.'
Our function, really, started as looking after the records of the county council.
But, of course, once you build a repository,
you begin to take in all sorts of things, and we take in now
anything relating to the life of Leicestershire,
Leicester and Rutland. Yeah.
We have records of institutions, clubs, societies,
the Leicestershire regiment, the cricket club, the football club. All sorts of things here.
'The tale starts with an extraordinary rediscovery,
'the archive of the old Kibworth Grammar School.'
Now you'll appreciate that a colleague has been listing it,
so the first two boxes, the early stuff is here.
And the really oldest material,
going back to the 1350s is in this box, as you see.
To the 1350s? To the 1350s, yes.
I cannot believe it!
How about that?
They were put into the hands of the then county record office
and I'm ashamed to say they more or less stayed as they'd arrived.
They were boxed, because they're not in the metal deed box that they came in... Yeah.
..but apart from that, they've remained pretty much as they arrived ever since.
So you're seeing a privileged view, if you like,
of a collection almost untouched by human hands.
MICHAEL CHUCKLES
'The documents are still being catalogued, but they include gifts
'of land by medieval Kibworth farmers,
'which were later owned by the village school.'
Just imagine, these deeds
refer to only one little group of properties in one parish.
Imagine how many documents there would have been
relating to Kibworth in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries.
Imagine all the people who were writing these things
and that gives you an idea of the extent of literacy in the Middle Ages.
We're not just talking about one literate man every 20 miles, I mean...
MICHAEL LAUGHS
..they're all over the place! Yeah.
And they're writing and they're writing and they're writing.
The villain, serfs,
tenants, had their own seals,
they issued charters when they were buying and selling property.
It's absolutely amazing, isn't it?
And these are all just mixed up, aren't they?
There's 14th century stuff here, 17th century...
This is going to be about 14th century
and it's written in nice clear Latin.
"Sciant presentes et futuri."
"Be it known to all those present and future..."
I'm translating, "..that we, Richard Brian of Smeeton
"in the county of Leicester,
"and William Parker of Kibworth Harcourt in the same county..." Kibworth Harcourt, yes.
Now, this is nice, the word "husbandmen" suddenly turns up amid the Latin.
We don't really have a word in Latin for "husbandmen".
If we did give them some weird classical Latin name
it might detract from the legality of it,
because a lawyer would always be able to argue that it didn't apply to them.
So for safety's sake, we revert to English here, "husbandmen".
Then we go back to Latin, "Dedimus consessimus,"
"We have given, conceded and by this, our present charter, we have confirmed..."
And so on and so on.
So we're passing on from us to another group
this particular little plot of land,
and the money from the land is being used
to say masses for the dead souls of the guild members.
So these local farmers were paying for what was called a chantry priest
to say prayers for the dead.
But chantry priests were literate men, often villagers,
who also acted as schoolmasters.
From the 1360s, this was happening all over England,
a silent revolution from the bottom of society.
It's how our medieval ancestors organised their lives.
Hedged by plague, war and want,
and the ever-present threat of famine, they were practical people.
For the 200 or 300 plague survivors in Kibworth and their children,
education was a path to the future.
By this time, hundreds of villages up and down the land
had their own tiny grammar schools or their schoolteachers.
By the time we reach the Tudors, England was the most literate society
that had yet existed in human history.
And, amazingly,
Kibworth High School still owns what today are known as the school lands.
These have provided the school with income for hundreds of years.
This is Peter. Hi, Peter.
'So we set out to try to trace one of the medieval gifts
'that we'd found in the school box.'
We were looking for one bequest out of the many
made by the villagers over the centuries.
"I, Robert, son of Nick Polle, of Kibworth Harcourt
"give one house, ten acres,
"and one rood in the fields and a dole of meadow in Kibworth Harcourt."
"I, Richard White,
"of Smeeton, give the annual rent of the following land in Smeeton,
"previously gifted us by William Weston."
"The gift of a house,
"lying between the house of John Polle on the north,
"and the King's highway on the east."
Now when Kibworth's medieval open fields
were finally swept away in 1779 during the Enclosures,
a new pattern was imposed on the landscape.
But on the new map, they still marked the old school field.
So we wondered whether the old pattern left by the medieval ploughmen
could still be traced on the ground.
I was expecting to see the canal here. Oh, it's here! Fantastic! How about that?
What do you reckon, shall we picnic here? As good a place as any.
Our plan was to try to locate one ten-acre bequest
from the Polle family in 1358.
GRASS BLADES SQUEAK
OK, team, let me just show you...
Let me just show you what I think is the story.
This is the Tithe map from 1781,
so it's just before the canal was built. We've walked along Mill...
They call it Mill Road there.
And here you can see "school land", that's where we're heading.
Incredible. Gifts of land being made by farmers
right back into the 14th century that eventually became part of what the school held.
Martin, you were saying, to my surprise, when I first saw this stuff,
that the lands are still held by the school today.
Yes, the school still owns the lands today and gets rents off the lands,
which now go towards grants for pupils to go to university
and subsequently it's been changed for apprenticeships as well.
Is there still a Board of Trustees? The governors are basically the trustees of the funds.
Great stuff, what an amazing story.
Cor, that looks very nice!
Shall we pack up?
From mapping the pattern of the medieval furrows,
we suspected that a little square field
in the middle of the school lands was one of these medieval legacies.
Its rent would have been a useful contribution to a rural teacher's pay - about £5 a year.
The school lands grew over time, a trust for future generations.
As yet there was no permanent building, but the village had a teacher, as it has ever since.
Farming weather!
Proper farming weather!
It's natural for them. It's natural for them! Yes, you know!
'At the end of a wet day, we met up with Morgan Pierce,
'who rents the field from the school today.'
What's the length of... the whole length of it here?
Did you work it out? We got 305 metres. 305 metres.
'And Morgan was able to help us spot the ridge and furrow patterns
'that could pin down the old ten-acre field.'
We got 316. How many bumps did you go over? Oh, loads.
I told you to go up where the wheelings are, I'd done that earlier!
Oh. It was when we did it on that side, on the other side of the hedge. Yeah.
That's cheating. No, it wasn't!
'The school field drawn on the 18th century map we measured at just over 300 yards long,
'but inside it we thought we'd found an older field about 100 yards square.'
This is the field edge that they've measured and what it looks like was,
if we align it round here, and you can tell us, Morgan,
there seems to have been a change in the ridge and furrow about halfway down?
Yes, well, it's just in the distance there, about 200 yards. Oh yeah, you can actually see...
The hump, and there's that hump, look.
Yeah, so there's definitely a change in alignment where that hump is.
Yeah. And that's what we've got halfway along the field, yeah.
So when was it ploughed up, the ridge and furrow?
You don't call it ridge, do you here? Rig and furrow.
Rig and furrow! Rig and furrow!
Fantastic. When was it ploughed?
I think it was ploughed, umm...
late '50s. Right, yeah.
A Mr Smith...
'So there it was, an almost invisible medieval field,
'perhaps the one given by the Polles in 1358.'
This is 20, whatever it is... 24.
24 days to plough it.
The rig and furrow and the acres were worked out
with what you could plough with a pair of horses.
In one day, yeah. And everybody's acre was different.
On different land, or...? The heavier the land. And what does that mean?
You can see here where it hasn't grown very well,
that's heavier than where it's nice and green.
'From the 1400s, education was a part of village life.
'When these farmers set up their bequest, they were paying for a priest who could also teach.
'And proof that young people in the village did get an education
'comes in a letter written in 1447 to the Fellows of Merton College, Oxford,
'on behalf of the village butcher,
'John Pitchard, describing the talents of a boy in the village.'
"Most worshipful and reverent Lord,
"I commend to me unto your worthy lordship
"desiring to hear of your prosperity and bodily health."
"Sir, we have a young man with us,
"which is a goodly scholar and a grammarian after the form of the country,
"and a likely man of person to do you service.
"He is the son of one of your tenants,
"that is to say the son of Agnes Palmer.
"The man deserves to have knowledge over all things.
"We pray you, all your tenants, that you would cherish him..."
"And forsooth, you will like his condition
"have you assayed him a while,
"both for governance and for person.
"No more at this time, but almighty God have you in his keeping.
"Written at Kibworth on the Feast of St Hugh the Martyr.
"Your own man and poor servant, John Pitchard."
It's a wonderful document. Maybe the first surviving letter composed by an English peasant.
It tells us all sorts of interesting things.
Widow Palmer's son already knew his Latin grammar.
Just as interesting is the fact that the ordinary peasants of Kibworth, the tenants,
felt that they could deal directly with the scholars of Merton College
and recommend their own children for higher education.
The concept comes from Canon law,
that if you draw revenue from land,
you must give something back
and the concept that was evolved was scholars,
poor scholars from villages,
and the thing which I think is interesting about that,
is that when you come to the 16th century,
a Fellow of the college called John Jewell,
who is the future Bishop of Exeter...
..and the writer of the Apology for the Church of England,
he says that it's more important that they should have wits
than anything else.
He doesn't actually say five A-Levels.
MURMURED CONVERSATION
'So education mattered to ordinary people in the Middle Ages,
'but so too did material advancement.
'In our big dig, the people of Kibworth had dug 55 test pits
'across the village, which had shown us the fluctuations of the village through the Middle Ages.'
The tale of a living community, isn't it? I was going to say a living organism.
You can, if you go right back to the beginning,
you can see the settlement growing, periods when it bursts into life...
'But as for what happened after the Black Death, the finds in the ground had us perplexed.'
The population collapses
and then seems to stagnate. We don't know if this happened...
you know, if this is exactly what it looked like in 1400,
it may have been more of a gradual decline.
You'd really have to say that these sites almost could be...
Certainly, Smeeton Westerby and Kibworth Beauchamp -
they could have be deserted villages, and there were plenty of deserted villages in Leicestershire,
but these don't remain deserted because they're lived in today.
Even up to 1550, there's been a stagnation between...for 200 years, virtually, hasn't there?
What happens? Is there a change in the psychology after the famines and the Black Death?
It would be fascinating to know.
Something like that which could have killed anything between a quarter and three-quarters of the population
would just have hugely impacted on everyone's attitude to life,
death, their whole security of existence, for generations to come.
And it did.
But for the survivors, there were greater opportunities in jobs,
in mobility and in making money,
as we can see in the late 14th century tax records of Kibworth,
now kept in The National Archive.
So this is one of the great documents of English history.
This is the Poll Tax of 1381, the tax that caused the Peasants' Revolt.
'Imposed by corrupt, incompetent, insolvent government,
'it was a universally hated tax,
'but it gives us a wonderful insight
'into the jobs and the new wealth of some of our villagers.'
And here's the people of Kibworth - the familiar families here who survived the Black Death.
The Gilberts, the Polles,
Adam Brown and his wife Joanna,
um...drapers.
Brown's is a story of upward mobility
and it starts in a house in Main Street, Kibworth,
later known as Brown's Place.
Now, this is amazing, isn't it?
Just look at this.
What an extraordinary feature this is!
That's absolutely incredible, isn't it? That's a wonderful thing.
It's a very fine example of a dragon beam.
Nothing to do with dragons, it's actually just a corruption of the word "diagonal".
They were actually trying to get a jetty,
an overhang, poking out of the building on that side
and also on that side. Done, really, very much for show.
'Long before Ian and Rosemary Williamson,
'a string of village reeves lived in the house over the centuries.
'Polles, Clarkes and Browns.'
An earlier phase of the house here?
This looks massive, massive and old.
It's absolutely enormous that beam, isn't it?
I mean, they did like to build with good sound timbers in the Middle Ages,
but that one really does look over the top! What are these marks here?
They're little scorch marks. Before they had proper beeswax candles they had rushes
just in dipped in tallow and so on,
and they would use them regularly as taper lights.
You do see these sort of scorch marks, which is rather alarming sometimes when you think...
And open all the way to the roof?
Open all the way up to the roof with the open hearth in the centre
and the smoke drifting up and that was how they liked it to be.
Great impressive space.
Any chance we could shine a torch into the roof?
You can do if you like.
Where we saw those studs rising up from the tie beam, they come up
and they joint right into that huge great collar
and you've got the original rafter and then that little cut-out,
that shows you what type of roof it was.
Just like houses today, over the generations there were many rebuilds and extensions.
If they had a lot of people sleeping in this room at any one time, they would have presumably,
in each of these parts where you've got the beams going across,
they would have had hangings. Still a bedroom today? Oh, yes.
It's a lovely bedroom, it's got a lovely atmosphere.
That's rather magic, isn't it?
Feeling all these rather benign ghosts
of the Browns and the Polles and the Clarkes and the rest.
Don't you think? Well, I think it brings it to life, yeah.
But with the medieval building accounts from Merton,
we can itemise every last lath nail.
1477, the Clarkes rented for 30 years a tenement in Kibworth
called Brown's Place, with three-and-a-half vergates of land.
1448, the expenses made out between Easter and the Feast of St Michael
for the building of a hall, stables, things like that...
..for Brown's place!
So the great question is,
is this a new build of 1448?
The only real way to establish that would be the tree-ring dating, really.
It would absolutely tie it down.
Would you be game to have it tree-ring dated, do you think?
Why not? It might be really interesting.
Because the tree-ring dating - if you get a felling date of 1447 for the timbers,
and here's it being built in 1448, then that would absolutely nail it down. Yeah.
So having already dug test pits in Rosemary and Ian's lawn,
we were now going to drill holes in their main beam.
OK.
Well, that's a...
That's a good core, that is. Plenty of rings on it.
Got the sap wood.
We ought to get some sort of result out of that.
ELECTRONIC BEEPING
Each of those beeps is the measurement of a ring.
Each one of those is a measurement in hundredths of a millimetre.
As you can see, the ring widths vary,
quite, you know, quite noticeably.
The accounts of Merton College Oxford seem to be referring
to a construction of a building,
or a part of a building, or a renewal of a building,
in 1448, interestingly enough. Oh, right.
They give us the detail of where the timber came from, even.
Really? Yeah. That would be very, very interesting.
What I think, is that the timbers of the north wing
are all felled sometime between, let's say 1325
and let's say, 1350.
But the hall range where that large beam was...
That's when you go up the stairs and there's that huge timber across?
That's right. We've got a very precise date,
and that timber and all the other timbers in that range,
are probably felled in 1385 and that's an absolutely precise date.
Well, I'm amazed! I can see you're almost speechless!
I might as well tear up the documentary research!
You know, there's me thinking I was being precise with 1448!
'So the house had at least three medieval building phases
'and the back part was much earlier than we'd thought.
'And in 1385 it may have been lived in
'by Adam and Joanna Brown of Main Street.
'Now Adam and Joanna were among a number of villagers
who started businesses away from Kibworth at that time
'in the boom town of the Middle Ages, Coventry.
'This is St Mary's Guildhall in Coventry,
'one of our finest and least known medieval buildings.'
Isn't this wonderful?
If you want an image of the civic pride of the 14th-century world,
this is it.
The town feasts, Corpus Christi festivals...
'This was the communal hall for the brethren and the sistren of the Guild of the Holy Trinity.'
This is the world to which
upwardly mobile families like the Browns of Kibworth aspired.
'To learn more I met up with a local expert, Dave McGrory.'
You can tell me more about this, I think.
I mean, what an incredible age this must have been for this city.
What was the population then, do we know?
Around 5,000 population at that point.
And at this time, lots of foreigners, as they said.
That's the term they used, "the foreigners" came in.
And they took up residence, and late in that same year,
they say that basically the population
is just over half these foreigners. Wow! Yeah.
All these aspiring people looking for the trade,
because in the end, Coventry had this great...
it had built up so it was just rising - it does this, Coventry, it goes up.
It gets blown up occasionally, but it keeps going up again.
I'm pursuing one village in Leicestershire,
and exactly as you said, in the aftermath of the Black Death,
quite a few of them start coming here.
Kibworth people were working here from the 1360s,
the Goddiers, the Haynes, and the Browns.
Adam Brown of Kibworth, and his wife, who's Joan, Joanna,
they are recorded as drapers,
but by 1405, they're in Coventry,
and they call themselves, "Of Kibworth and Coventry."
So they're exactly what you were talking about in terms of strangers and foreigners.
They actually, were members of this guild. This is their hall?!
Yes, they would have come in here.
They were here! Yes. They were here! Amazing, isn't it?
And, of course, being a member of this guild had important things.
It's a stepping stone to become, say, even an alderman or a member of the council.
This was considered that as well.
This was a stepping stone for your way up and it was also, of course,
a stepping stone for your business.
Basically, to trade properly in Coventry, you have to be a member of this guild,
and, of course, you would get cheap quayage in Bristol Docks and there were other perks
elsewhere, where they actually paid no market tolls.
Tell us about cheap quayage in Bristol docks, what does that involve?
It's basically, they would store their wool or cloth at the docks,
but the aldermen of Bristol would make everyone else pay a full price
for the storage but if you were a member of this guild, you got it half price.
Then you could export it abroad and they exported all over Europe.
Adam and Joan's son, William, marries Agnes,
the daughter of Richard Doddenhall.
Doddenhall... He was one of the early mayors of Coventry.
They set up home in Earl Street, close by.
A des-res? A des-res is, it? Yes, fairly des-res.
It's just the back of the hall in this direction
and it was some of the early good housing in the city.
They're on an upward trajectory then, I suppose.
They are, aren't they? Aiming for the stars!
Aiming for the stars, fantastic!
So through literacy and personal drive, even an English peasant could rise in the world.
The Coventry they knew was destroyed by the bombers and the planners,
but here's Earl Street where the Browns lived
and these are the streets where they shopped
on their trips from Kibworth.
We can trace ten generations of the Brown family,
each generation adding to the family nest egg.
And the story doesn't end there with Adam's son,
William, and his wife, Agnes.
Hi, Jane.
'You can find the sequel in another of Coventry's medieval secrets.'
Yes, this is one of our treasures.
That's the first Leet Book. 'The Leet Book, and what a book it is!'
A record of Coventry's civic life
at the peak of its medieval wealth, I suppose. Yes.
Cor! Absolutely wonderful.
Now I'm looking for the mayor's correspondence.
'These are letters from winter 1485, the year Richard III was killed
'at the Battle of Bosworth at the end of the Wars of the Roses.'
This is Rob Olney writing to his...
old friend in London, I suppose,
who is John Brown, who is the great-grandson of Will and Agnes
who set up house in Earl Street, the Kibworthian.
"Right worshipful sir, I recommend me unto you in my most
"hearty wise, desiring your welfare and praying you will give credence
"to the bringer of this letter."
And he's writing to him asking him to consider being the next mayor of the city.
It ends here, "Written at Coventry, your true lover, Rob Olney,
"mayor of the City of Coventry,
"to the right worshipful John Brown be this delivered."
Brown is now working as a mercer in London so the family history
has taken them as drapers and mercers
from Kibworth to Coventry and then to London.
May we see what John's reply is?
"Right worshipful and my very good master, I recommend me to you,
"thanking you in full heartly wise for your letter,
"and that it hath pleased you so to remember me as you have done
"and of me never in any wise deserved..."
Sort of self-deprecating, it's very sweet.
"..as for mayor, I think myself full unable there to."
His business commitments as a mercer,
now in London, are just too great.
"But," he adds,
"I trust it should be my fortune hereafter something
"to do that shall be to your pleasure.
"Written at London, the Monday next after
"the Feast of the Circumcision of our Lord.
"Yours, J Brown."
You could hardly have a more perfect example of the rise of a family
who started off as villains in the documents of Merton College
in the 1280s with 15 acres and a cottage and to rise through hard work,
through canny business dealings and clearly through social skills,
to become, well, middle class.
This, too, is the English story.
So with education and literacy came material advancement
but the third of our invisible changes
was the push for freedom of thought.
In the late 14th century, an attempted religious revolution
was to shake the foundations of the English Church and state.
Back home in the village, away from the fields and the family house,
the centre of the peasants' lives was the parish church.
14th-century font.
'And in the late 1300s, St Wilfrid's in Kibworth
'was extensively rebuilt.'
The nave here,
14th century as well, post-Black Death.
'Funded by the villagers themselves, the rebuilding gave them a beautiful new spire.'
A lovely oak screen here.
Just look at this!
It's a late 14th century screen made of oak.
Beautiful! And a little window here.
They used to call these leper windows, didn't they?
Where the sick, the infirm, the people who were suffering from disease, could look in.
For the people of the time, it would have been a bit of a shock of the new.
Previously, the church would have had those clunky Norman pillars,
lots of shadow and suddenly, the church is opened up.
Beautiful light columns letting lots of light and air into the church.
A real sense of being in the heavenly court.
Two altars, the one in the north aisle was dedicated
in honour of Our Lady of Kibworth.
This is a miraculous image.
A miraculous image? Wow.
Often remembered in villagers' wills,
she would have looked like the much more famous Virgin of Walsingham.
The villagers belonged to a huge ecclesiastical empire.
A vast diocese whose mother church was the cathedral at Lincoln.
The cathedral was really designed for visitors.
For pilgrims coming from all over the country.
You open the door and there's prayer going on.
Now there are over 50 chantries,
they actually produced a timetable so the masses would carry on
continuously at each chapel, at each altar,
all through the morning from about five o'clock until midday.
But then, as now, the Church of Rome aroused both affection
and hostility, bitter accusations that in amassing secular power and wealth,
it had departed from its pure, apostolic mission.
This is one of the great series of registers of the Bishops of Lincoln
which start earlier in date than any other diocese,
not only in medieval England but in the whole of Western Europe,
simply because Lincoln was just such a vast diocese,
stretching from the Humber, up in the north of Lincolnshire,
right down to the Thames in South Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire,
getting on for 2,000 parish churches.
You'll find...
that a Kibworth entry is just here.
Now this is the free chapel of Kibworth Harcourt,
that's a chapel in a manor, rather than a parish
and chapels could be of different types.
The lowest level was where the lord of the manor would have an oratory,
a private chapel in his house,
he would claim to the Bishop that it was a long way to go to church,
the way was muddy in winter or it was wet, he had to cross a river,
or it was cold.
There's one memorable example from the 1290s where the local
lord of the manor said that he needed to have a private chapel because his mother
was very ill and his wife was very fat and so they couldn't get to church.
Page after page after page of individual legacies,
of the name of the person, the name of the place where they lived,
and down the end column here, the sum of money,
usually fairly small, 4d, 6d, 8d.
"I, Katherine Polle of Kibworth Harcourt,
"being sound of mind and memory, make this my testament in this manner.
"I leave to the Mother Church of Lincoln, 4d."
"I, Thomas Coleman of Kibworth, husbandman,
"give to the Mother Church of Lincoln, 4d."
"I, Elizabeth Clarke, of Kibworth Beauchamp,
"give to the Church of Lincoln, 2d."
It must have been a sense of belonging,
this was our diocese, this was the diocese, however huge,
that we belong to. A group identity.
Such were the bonds, both real and psychological,
which held the people of Kibworth from the cradle to the grave.
But in the late 14th century, that edifice of power was challenged by
radical dissenters,
attempting to purge English Christianity of its corruption.
They were known as the Lollards.
And by an extraordinary coincidence, the story begins on the high table
of the landlord of Kibworth Harcourt - Merton College, Oxford.
The key figure was a brilliant and obstinate Yorkshireman, John Wycliffe.
Wycliffe was a fellow of the College.
He gets the title, Flos Doctorum, the Flower of the Doctors.
I mean, not just a Doctor of Theology,
but the top Doctor of Theology in Oxford.
So a top mind of his day. A top mind of his day.
You see, Wycliffe had 101 things, one was the attack
on transubstantiation in 1382, that is the key document that makes him
a heretic that the archbishop must clamp down on.
He writes a thing called De Eucharistia,
about the Eucharist, but until then they try and play along with him
and think, "Oh, he's just another one of these clever Oxford preachers."
But he challenges the payment of tithes
and the worship of images.
Wycliffe inspires a whole range of people.
They hear his lectures and take them out into Leicestershire, Northamptonshire
and into the villages.
And in Kibworth and nearby villages, Lollardy became a popular movement.
Unlicensed preachers,
William Brown and Walter Gilbert, preaching their sermons in English.
They realised that their language was English,
not Latin, not French, but English.
People like Chaucer, of course, you know, writing in English
and people proud to be English-speaking, reading English.
"This Gospel tells a lore of Christ.
"When he was 12-year-old
"and this Lord is full of miracles, as other deeds..."
Written in East Midlands dialect, this book of Lollard sermons
was copied in secret somewhere near Kibworth.
"He went with Joseph and Mary unto Jerusalem,
"as they hadden custom at pasc."
Easter? Easter time?
Yes, that's right.
"For to make this pilgrimage."
His pilgrim-age!
Yes, now we're back to Chaucer again!
"His father and his mother wenten home and Christ left all one..."
Alone, yes.
.."in the city." That's right.
'In the age of Chaucer, English was a literary language again,
'but also, despite the teaching of the Church, the language of God.'
"For children hadden in free custom
"to chose where that they wolden wender."
"For children hadden in free custom
" to chose where that they wolden wender,"
where they wanted to go with Mum or with Dad.
With Father or with Mother,
and "This Joseph wender that Christ had come with his mother
"and Our Lady..." His mother...
"..supposed that Christ had come with Joseph."
It's lovely... idiomatic people's speech, isn't it?
It's a lovely simple tale
and it's in the language that people listening would understand.
And at the heart of it, core idea in it all, Robin,
is that you've got to get back to the Bible text itself. Is that right?
That's what they're saying?
Yes. Of course, you always want to get back to the word of God.
You don't want the word of God filtered through somebody else,
particularly someone else who you might have some reason not to trust.
Lollard preachers from Kibworth like William Brown and Walter Gilbert
preached what even today would be revolutionary ideas.
"That any good man may be a priest."
"Or any good woman."
"That every man may lawfully withdraw and withhold tithes and offerings
"from priests and give them straight to the poor people.
"That is more pleasing to God."
"You don't need a church to marry you,
"a union of hearts is enough."
"A bad priest can't be a priest."
"That the Pope of Rome is Father Anti-Christ
"and false in all his workings.
"A false extortioner and a deceiver of the people."
Lollard books were publicly burned wherever they could be found.
And soon the preachers would be, too.
The Lollards were part of a pan-European of revolt
against the forms and practices of the Catholic Church
and here in England, the government saw them as a huge threat.
What's so extraordinary about the story is that Kibworth itself
becomes the centre of the heresy.
Now the Lollards had a secret underground network
but in the Merton Archives, we can pick up their trail.
So what's the document first of all, Julian?
Well, it's one of the bursar's account rolls.
There were three bursars who each took four month period of the year.
Because if you're looking for explanations as to how villagers
become quite radicalised, if I can use that word,
as Lollards in the early 15th century,
there are clues to be found here, perhaps.
Where that link may have come from. And first of all is the vicar, Thomas Hulman.
He's vicar from 1380 onwards, so...
He's here in '83 certainly. He might even have known Wycliffe, perhaps?
You see this expense of the custodies of the warden,
"Et Hulman usque London,"
so the warden and Hulman doing business in London,
and later on to Cambridge.
A man who'd been for the Archbishop of Canterbury's investigators
for his heretical opinions.
So back in the 1380s, the Vicar of Kibworth had been a follower of Wycliffe
and in the 1390s, college fellows who were Lollard sympathisers
made many journeys to Kibworth.
One of them the lawyer, Rob Stoneham, absconded with money from the villagers.
It's £10 something shillings, £10, 9 shillings or something,
which is a substantial amount of money if you're carrying that
on your person from Leicestershire to Oxfordshire.
Were they diverting funds to the cause,
copying those forbidden manuscripts?
No-one knows, but the Merton documents
also show that in Kibworth, two convicted Lollard heretics,
Roger and Alice Dexter, were given a house by our old friend, the draper, Adam Brown.
And for centuries afterwards,
Kibworth would continue to be a haven of dissent.
In the 17th century there were Independents, Quakers,
and Congregationalists here, though they're almost gone now.
About six old ladies and me, and they kept dying off.
After the Civil War,
dissent in Kibworth was once even put down by force.
Was it 1662 or something it started? Yes, something like that.
It was the centre of the social life in Kibworth Harcourt.
Beauchamp had the church and the Methodist chapel.
There were two Baptist churches here at one point, as well.
What is it about Kibworth that makes it such an extraordinary centre
of dissent and non-conformity?
I honestly don't know what the reason was.
Except that maybe it was a useful centre
between Market Harborough and Leicester, and it drew in people from the area around.
There'd been the dissenting academy, hadn't there?
Yes, I was amazed when I was first at university,
this was in Liverpool doing education,
they mentioned Kibworth Academy. I nearly fell off my seat!
But back in 1414, after the death of King Henry IV,
the village was swept up in the Lollards' bid to topple Church and State.
The new king was the young Henry V who was soon to be the victor of Agincourt and a national hero.
But not to the Lollards.
To them, he was the son of a usurper,
and the agent of Anti-Christ and their plan was to overthrow him
and install a Regent, the Lollard, Sir John Oldcastle,
in charge of a new order.
All over England, the underground cells of the Lollards sent out
their summonses and here in Kibworth and in Smeaton,
the call was answered by seven good men and true.
The rebels came from all over England, from East Anglia,
the Midlands, from the Cotswolds,
Oxford and Bristol.
They hoped to assemble an army of 20,000 men
and overthrow King Henry V.
They marched down to London to make a rendezvous
in what were then fields just outside the city,
near an ancient well, today's Clerkenwell.
It's a real convergence place, isn't it?
Well, I mean, it was the meat market.
Here's St John's and this looks like Clerkenwell Green just here, doesn't it? Yes.
All the rebels who were coming down from the Midlands were told to meet
at a tavern called The Wrestlers On The Hoop.
Clerk's Well!
It's still there! Yeah, isn't that fantastic?
"The spring by which it is supplied is situated four feet eastwards.
"In remote ages, annually were performed ancient sacred plays."
Yeah, well, they must have happened right out here,
this sort of natural theatre here.
So it must have been either just over here or just over there.
Apparently, they got on each other's shoulders
and people fought from on top of each other's shoulders at each other.
So the great inn here, the Wrestler On The Hoop?
The Wrestlers On The Hoop. The Wrestlers On The Hoop.
The Wrestlers On The Hoop was where all the rebels coming down from
the North, from the Midlands, were all supposed to converge.
They were supposed to meet here and then they were going to be told where to go next.
Let's see whether we can find the next landmark.
It was January 1414, scriveners, parchment makers, drapers,
the rebels were typical of the new literate English proletariat.
So did Roger and Alice move to Kibworth, or maybe they were...?
The rebels were to meet in St Giles' Fields
which is over by Tottenham Court Road, on the way to Westminster from Clerkenwell.
So what happened to the rebellion in the end?
The King got wind of it.
He had a spy in his employ.
The King's forces were already waiting for them, so there wasn't
really any actual fighting, I don't think.
They just captured a lot of people.
Unfortunately for the Kibworth rebels, they were amongst those
people who were summarily executed at the scene, at St Giles' Field itself.
Tragic story though, isn't it? Tragic story, yes.
But a lot of what they were striving for we can identify with today.
Modern ideas that we would take for granted were things they were just aspiring toward.
They were just free people with their own ideas,
their own destinies in their hands,
and trying to shape their worlds more than they had in the past.
This is where the story ended.
St Giles-In-The-Fields.
Near this spot in 1417,
Sir John Oldcastle, the Lollard, was hanged and burnt.
And with him, Walter and Nicholas Gilbert of Kibworth Harcourt in Leicestershire.
The Lollards have often been called the Morning Star of the Reformation, haven't they?
Precursors of the Church of England.
Well, possibly.
I think if you look at them in a European context,
there were regular groups that were seen as going off at a tangent
from the rest of the church.
I think there were political overtones,
as well as theological ones,
and that's why it was put down so sharply.
The Kibworth Lollards, the Gilberts, the Valentines and Browns,
came from the class of peasants
who had benefited from the new opportunities in work and education.
They failed.
But their premature Reformation was the precursor of the great events
of the 16th century under Henry VIII,
when the Reformation finally came.
You can imagine the reaction back here in Main Street in Kibworth,
the public hanging and burning of two sons of the village.
Village families here had been split over the issue.
Polles, the Valentines, the Barons, all these families had been
reeves and bailiffs, pillars of the community.
Whether these ideas continue to run under the surface of life here
in the village, we don't know.
What you can be sure is that, like any community, the villagers just
close their curtains and got on with the business of making a living and improving their lives.
So that's how those hidden changes in education,
in work and in thought, began a crucial shift in English society
and with them came changes in a key medieval institution, marriage.
Welcome to this wonderful and very special occasion...
From the 15th century, ordinary English men and women begin to marry later,
to have smaller families and to adopt new strategies of inheritance.
Father, Son and Holy Spirit...
And that would have a big influence on us...
For better, for worse.
All that I am, I give to you...
..on population and wealth and property,
on what will become known as English individualism.
I therefore proclaim that they are husband and wife.
That which God has joined together, let no man put asunder.
To an outsider in Tudor times, Kibworth still looked the same.
Still an open field village,
still with many of the old families we've got to know since the 1200s.
Absolutely gorgeous!
Now the old families, there's the Foxes, the Bryans...
..the Sanders, they go back into the Middle Ages.
But they're not peasants any more.
From now on they are almost modern people, like you or me.
CHURCH BELLS PEEL
And in time, those changes will lead to the Protestant Reformation,
the rise of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution -
the next chapter in the Story Of England.
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