Book description
The village of Kibworth in Leicestershire lies at the very centre of
England. It has a church, some pubs, the Grand Union Canal, a First
World War Memorial - and many centuries of recorded history. In the
thirteenth century the village was bought by William de Merton, who
later founded Merton College, Oxford, with the result that documents
covering 750 years of village history are lodged at the college.
Building on this unique archive, and enlisting the help of the current
inhabitants of Kibworth, with a village-wide archeological dig, with the
first complete DNA profile of an English village and with use of local
materials like family memorabilia, Michael Wood tells the extraordinary
story of one English community over fifteen centuries, from the moment
that the Roman Emperor Honorius sent his famous letter in 410 advising
the English to look to their own defences to the village as it is today.
The story of Kibworth is the story of England itself, a 'Who Do You
Think You Are?' for the entire nation. It is the subject of a six-part
BBC tv series to be shown in autumn 2010. Michael Wood was born and
educated in Manchester. He was an open scholar in Modern History at
Oriel College, Oxford, where he held a Bishop Fraser scholarship in
Medieval History as a postgraduate. He has made a number of
internationally successful tv series, including In the Footsteps of
Alexander the Great, and four of his books have been UK non-fiction
number one bestsellers. His highly acclaimed book of essays on early
English history, In Search of England, was published by Penguin in 1999.
