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00:00We've set out to uncover the story of one place through the whole of English history.
00:10Romans, Vikings, Anglo-Saxons.
00:13That is a piece of an Anglo-Saxon bone cone.
00:16And all with the help of the local people.
00:18I told you it was only going to get better, didn't I?
00:21We think we found a mortar floor here.
00:24If in doubt, I put it in the tub and then Robert throws it out.
00:29The more you find out about the village, the more intriguing it gets.
00:33You don't realise the heritage that a village like Harcourt or Beecham has.
00:39The place is Kibworth in Leicestershire.
00:48Using archaeology and science, we've already found a lost past.
00:52I can tell you who may well have lived on this spot.
00:55His name was Alfredge.
00:57So, basically, we're going to have to dig up your entire...
00:59Oh, God!
01:01The first chapter took us as far as 1066, the Norman Conquest.
01:06What does it feel like as you suddenly have this new world coming on top of you?
01:12It's not. It's the end of the world. It's not a new world, it's the finish.
01:15The end of the world. The end of the world. It's a disaster.
01:19How did the villagers respond to this disaster of conquest and war
01:25and brutal foreign occupation?
01:28How did it shape them and change them?
01:31How did they become us?
02:19In 1066, Anglo-Saxon England fell to the army of William the Conqueror
02:24at the Battle of Hastings.
02:26Everybody's getting butterflies in their stomachs.
02:29The fear is starting to bite.
02:38Standing in the shield wall that day,
02:40there may have been men of Kibworth under their lord Alfredge.
02:43Yes, they've slammed into that shield wall again.
02:45They're really giving it some hammer now.
02:47The English nation fell there, said the Anglo-Saxon chronicle,
02:50and God gave victory to the Normans.
02:53We also have groups here from all over Europe.
02:56We have friends here from France, from the Netherlands,
03:00from Germany, from Poland.
03:03The Gronmaniel family are one of the big Norman aristocratic families.
03:08They're the warrior bands who come with William to fight for him,
03:12to make his new crown possible.
03:15Hugh Gronman, he gets a huge cut of the new lands of England.
03:20He's given a large chunk of land in and around Leicestershire
03:23with the town of Leicester and the new Norman castle that's built there.
03:28And castles were one of the great innovations
03:31that the Normans brought to England.
03:37The Norman Hugh Gronmaniel now became the chief lord in Kibworth
03:41and the villagers passed under Norman rule with a resident Frenchman.
04:01Reporting in English, the Anglo-Saxon chronicle says
04:05that the Normans spread their grip over the whole of England
04:09and they oppressed the English people by building castles everywhere.
04:16Now, I think they built one in Kibworth
04:18using the old Roman mound in the centre of the village, the munt.
04:22But how to prove it?
04:25The Normans siege Leicester, sack it, destroy half the city,
04:30level 120 houses to build a castle.
04:34And in the hinterland, they built small castles,
04:37mott and baileys, earth mounds with outer enclosures.
04:42And here in Kibworth, one of the most populous villages in Leicestershire,
04:47that would be the context for building this here.
04:52You can imagine the Norman knights,
04:54they're heavily armed like SAS men, tough as nails,
04:58press-ganging the villagers to dig the ditches to throw this up,
05:02building the stockade on top, imposing a garrison locally.
05:08This is the area that we surveyed.
05:11It's hardly discernible.
05:13Yeah, no obvious features. No obvious features.
05:16More work needed.
05:19Proof that it was a castle was frustratingly elusive.
05:22It's all rubbish, obviously, from garden.
05:25It's been so heavily disturbed, it's...
05:28I was still convinced that we'd got a Norman castle.
05:31In other places in Leicestershire where there's a Frenchman in the village,
05:35there's also a castle.
05:37We drew a blank with the Hallerton Group.
05:40The site's been too badly damaged in the last couple of hundred years
05:44to be able to tell whether it's a Norman castle or not.
05:48But the evidence has to be there somewhere.
05:51And where better to look than in the great 18th century
05:56history of Leicestershire by John Nicholls?
05:59Kibworth Church, before the spire fell.
06:03And this is what the munt was like in the 1790s.
06:10At the back of the Red Lion Inn.
06:13That's the Bobberley Pizzeria today.
06:16A large mount encompassed with a single ditch,
06:20the circumference of which at the bottom is 122 yards,
06:26and the height in the slope of the mount about 18 yards.
06:32It's a huge difference with what we see today.
06:35And then, this is really interesting,
06:37running away from it for 55 yards north-east,
06:42another ditch three or four yards deep.
06:45That's the crucial clue.
06:48Now, when you compare that with what you see today,
06:53surviving Norman castles like Hallerton here
06:57almost identical size and shape,
07:03and you draw that on the map of the village...
07:11..then what you get...
07:14..is a Norman Mott and Bailey castle.
07:28So, even little Kibworth Harcourt got its Norman castle,
07:33with its Frenchmen dominating the Saxon village
07:37with its allotments behind.
07:39And pretty soon after the invasion and conquest,
07:42the Anglo-Saxon landowners here, Edwin and Alfrich,
07:46and Alfmaier, were removed,
07:48part of a wholesale removal of the English ruling class.
07:51By 1086, there was only two out of 1,400 left.
07:56Only 1,400 chief tenants in England are of English origin.
08:01And even more fantastic, for the next 100 years,
08:05there's virtually no intermarriage
08:07between the Norman aristocracy and the native English.
08:10The Normans quite clearly consider the Anglo-Saxons
08:14socially and ethnically inferior,
08:17and the English here are living not only under occupation,
08:22but under apartheid.
08:25It took William and his mercenary armies nearly 20 years
08:29to subdue the English.
08:34And then, in winter 1085...
08:41The king had deep speech with his councillors about England,
08:45what sort of land it was, what kind of people.
08:54And he sent his men all over the country to find out.
09:02The jury men from Kibworth and Smeaton
09:05were summoned to their assembly place.
09:08It lay in the countryside north of Kibworth,
09:11and for centuries was the meeting point for the local hundred,
09:14the subdivision of the Shire.
09:18And as its name suggests, it was a tree.
09:22I've come here to meet a Kibworth man
09:24who's been obsessed with local history all his life
09:27and who thinks that he can pinpoint the lost site of the Gar Tree.
09:36These now-forgotten meeting places
09:38lie at the root of the English system of local representation.
09:44Hi, Stuart.
09:46And Stuart knows more than anybody about this one.
09:49Good to see you. And you.
09:51Thanks for this. Come in, come in.
09:53The den. Oh, gosh.
09:55The Gar Tree stopped being used for local government
09:58and oath-taking in the early 1700s,
10:01but the site was recorded by the great 18th-century antiquarian
10:05John Nicholls.
10:07Because in here, there is actually one of the very only maps
10:13of where the Gar Tree bush used to be.
10:17Isn't that fantastic? There.
10:19Oh, yeah.
10:20And it's on the Roman Road, the old Roman Road,
10:23on the north side of the Gar Tree Road.
10:26Let me show you on the map. So it's on the Roman Road itself?
10:29It is. I think it's there.
10:30These trees and mounds were important places for the English.
10:34As late as the 19th century, in many places,
10:36they voted in the open air, just like their ancient ancestors.
10:44When I was a lad, there used to be a big tree
10:46which is now gone, and this is what I'm looking for here.
10:51That's the old, the last Gar Tree that stood on the point.
11:00And there it is beside the road itself.
11:05With the Roman Road disappearing to the distance.
11:10I always believed it was the site of the Gar Tree bush.
11:14Not many years after that, it...
11:18..died.
11:19It was a sad moment, because it was the last,
11:23it was the only thing that identified where I think,
11:25where we think the spot is, and when it fell, it rotted away.
11:29The farmer didn't touch it for several months,
11:32knowing it to be hallowed ground, he left it.
11:36And they are kind of hallowed ground, actually, aren't they,
11:39these kind of places?
11:40I mean, thousands of years of being the landmark for the people of this,
11:44the whole part of this shire, this part of the shire.
11:47Such was the importance of, to me, of this spot,
11:51that I actually got a piece of the tree that was lying in the field.
11:57And there it is. That's the last piece of the Gar Tree.
12:01Holy trees, ancient myths, Hearn the Hunter, Robin Hood.
12:06It's a fragment from the roots of England.
12:09Like an elephant skull, isn't it? It is.
12:13I took loads of aerial photographs through the years,
12:17and on one day, when the sun was going low, one evening,
12:21I actually took a photograph of the crossroads.
12:23Not only... It was not until I got it developed and blown up,
12:27I actually saw what seemed to be an enormous mound
12:32on the site where the tree stood.
12:34But I think there's something ancient about that.
12:37Yes, that's amazing, because the name, the Gar Tree,
12:41is probably Scandinavian, it's probably post-9th century.
12:45But the earlier English name is recorded in the Middle Ages,
12:50and it seems to be Mathelu or something like that.
12:53The Normans couldn't get the language straight.
12:56But it seems to mean that the speech mound, or the meeting mound,
13:01or the mound where people spoke...
13:03We should go and have a look. Let's do that. Can we?
13:06Yeah.
13:09The Gar Tree stood at the physical centre of the Hundred.
13:13It was a place known to everyone.
13:16Great view across the Welland Valley.
13:18Oh, it's absolutely fantastic, isn't it? Look at that.
13:21Across the Slawston Hills, the Cordles,
13:25over to the south bank of the Welland.
13:28Which I suppose is what you want for a moot place, isn't it?
13:32Exactly.
13:34And who's to say they didn't light a bonfire on the day
13:37when the moot was being held to summon people?
13:40Thorpe Langton and Staunton Wyreville, Church Langton,
13:44all the southern villages of the Gar Tree Hundred.
13:47Medbourne and Hallerton, and you can see through there
13:50even Market Harbour and, of course, Kibworth, just over here.
13:54All connected.
13:56You would get the message, whether it was by bonfire or signal,
13:59and the villagers would see where the point of the meet was,
14:03the moot site, they could see clearly.
14:05It must have been this time of year in 1086 that the jurors,
14:09the ordinary freemen of these villages, including Kibworth,
14:14all came to this spot, maybe over a few days,
14:18to give all the information about themselves to the foreigners,
14:23to the Normans, with their English secretaries,
14:26presumably the collaborators who wrote all this down,
14:30including taxable information.
14:32I mean, that's what it is, isn't it?
14:34I wonder how accurate they were over there.
14:36The first real declaration of their infantry, the handover.
14:42HE SPEAKS GERMAN
14:55He was a hard man.
14:57He was swift, stark.
15:01Which means that he was a very hard man, yes.
15:12And afterwards, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,
15:15all the results of the survey were brought to him.
15:21They're in the National Archive in Kew today, in Doomsday Book.
15:26This is Leicestershire, and here you can see how it's organised.
15:31Here's the list of the landowners,
15:33most of them Norman lords who, of course, have replaced...
15:36It's not a neutral historical source,
15:38but it's a record of a cataclysmic takeover in English history.
15:49Here we go, Kibworth.
15:52Kibworth, Kibworth, Cliburn even.
15:56That's obviously Norman's mishearing Anglo-Saxon, isn't it?
15:59Oh, and that's actually the Frenchman.
16:03Kibworth Harcourt, first of all.
16:06There's 12 caricates of arable land on this.
16:09It's the old Danish system of measuring land,
16:11which they used in the East Midlands.
16:14In Kibworth Harcourt, the population was a mix of free and unfree people,
16:19with some slaves and the Frenchman.
16:25But in Kibworth Beecham, curiously, in view of its later history,
16:29there were no free people at all.
16:37While in Smeaton and Westerby, the majority were free.
16:47As for what happened to the Anglo-Saxon lords before 1066,
16:51Elfridge and Elfmere, Edwin Alferth and the rest,
16:55we simply don't know.
16:57But perhaps there's one little clue,
16:59one trace of human feeling in all this bureaucratic detail
17:05in an entry from a village further south
17:08where one Elfridge had farmed his land freely before 1066,
17:13but now farms it at a rent from William a Norman,
17:18graviter et miserabiliter,
17:21miserably and with a heavy heart.
17:24And you can bet that they felt the same way in Kibworth too.
17:29For the English people, it was the start of a long time of oppression,
17:33and in Kibworth they saw the horrors close up.
17:371124.
17:39In this same year before Christmas,
17:42Ralph Bassett held a court of the King's Thangs
17:46at Hound Hill in Leicestershire
17:49and hanged there more thieves than anyone had before.
17:5644 men were killed in no time.
17:59Six of them were blinded and castrated
18:02and the honest people said many of them suffered very unjustly there.
18:10But our Lord God, from whom no secrets are hid,
18:14sees the poor oppressed by every kind of injustice,
18:18deprived of their property and their lives.
18:21A terrible year was this.
18:24BELOVED OF HOLLYWOOD SCRIPTWRITERS
18:30Beloved of Hollywood scriptwriters,
18:32the Norman Yoke was not just a myth.
18:36BELOVED OF HOLLYWOOD SCRIPTWRITERS
18:52There was rage and racism on both sides.
18:55The defeated English retreated into their own language,
18:58their own jokes, their own customs.
19:02To the Normans, the English were lazy, cowardly,
19:06treacherous, superstitious,
19:08not to mention their dog-like barking that passed the speech.
19:15But most of all, the Normans thought the English were uncontrolled boozers.
19:21And it's at this time that you get the first descriptions
19:24of that hallowed English institution which existed in every village,
19:29the Domus Potationis, the Eialhus, the pub.
19:35One Norman writer describes the interior of one of these places
19:39where the rustics sat at their tables and benches
19:42and where, if you looked carefully,
19:44you could see little devils perched on the lip of every man's cup.
19:48THEY CHATTER
19:56He's the old one, I'm the good-looking one.
19:59THEY CHATTER
20:04So, even then, the English seemed to have seen the pub
20:07as a place where you could get away from it to chew things over,
20:11you know, see a man about a dog.
20:14But the Normans, for them,
20:17the pub was a place you wouldn't be seen dead in.
20:26Kibworth, in the 12th and 13th centuries,
20:28was split between several Norman lords,
20:30two of whom have left their surnames in the village till today,
20:34the Harcourts and the Beachhams.
20:39To get a picture of the village, then,
20:41we have to turn to the maps drawn up by a later landlord
20:44who took over Kibworth Harcourt in the 1260s, Merton College, Oxford.
20:50Look at all that, this is absolutely fantastic.
21:00Astonishingly, Merton kept a record of all the families
21:04who lived here from that time.
21:06Oh, the old families.
21:08The Parkers, the Foxes,
21:11Colemans, Wayne's ancestors, the Bryans,
21:14the Sanders, they go back into the Middle Ages,
21:17isn't that just gorgeous?
21:20London Way.
21:23So, that's the A6.
21:25And Kibworth's on Great Route.
21:27Poor little Kibworth here.
21:29And still presumably working as an open-field village.
21:32So, as it had been in the 13th, 14th century.
21:36Oh, it's absolutely wonderful.
21:38And St Wilfrid's Church still has its beautiful spire.
21:42Right, right.
21:44One of the village tragedies.
21:46When did that disappear?
21:48It fell in 1825.
21:50160 feet, it was absolutely beautiful.
21:54But the key to the Merton maps,
21:56the centre of life in Kibworth from the Anglo-Saxons until 1779,
22:01is the open fields.
22:06And if you want to see what life was like in the heyday of the open fields,
22:11there's one place you can go.
22:13Laxton, the last open-field village.
22:21Here in Laxton, you can see how our ancestors made their living
22:25for over 800 years.
22:28Everyone had strips in the open fields.
22:31Everything worked by cooperation,
22:33overseen by an elected field jury of 12 good men and true.
22:38So this is exactly what they did in Kibworth
22:41back in the 1200s and the 1300s.
22:44This is the field jury going out into the fields,
22:47check the width of the strips, hammer the stakes in,
22:50check whether one farmer's infringed on the other's fields.
22:54So what are you looking for then, Roy?
22:58How can you tell where to put them?
23:00It's just around the edge of the curve of the field.
23:03The roadway should be 15 foot wide.
23:05Right.
23:06All these roadways should be at 15 foot.
23:08If it's less than that, somebody's ploughed too far.
23:11The great thing about this is you get a real sense
23:14of what an open-field landscape looked like
23:16with these huge open fields.
23:18There's no division between the strips
23:20apart from the bulks and the stakes.
23:26It's a great wide-open landscape.
23:28This is the open field.
23:30It's a great wide-open landscape.
23:32It's a great wide-open landscape.
23:34It's a great wide-open landscape.
23:36It's a great wide-open landscape.
23:39It's a great wide-open landscape.
23:41This is just what Kimworth would have looked like then.
23:45A well-off peasant might have 50 or 60 little strips
23:48scattered through the three fields.
23:52None of them's straight.
23:53There's not a single piece that's straight, I don't think.
23:56Not one. I know what I'm doing.
23:58I always think it's to do with the land,
24:00because you can't plough...
24:02The land, the soil changes as it goes across,
24:05and it pulls your plough.
24:06But if you keep ploughing it every time the same way,
24:09where it's gone one way, you keep going the same.
24:12The light land ploughs straight and the strong land ploughs wide.
24:17Here at Laxton, you can get a sense of the communal effort
24:20of our ancestors, men and women,
24:22that was needed to maintain such a complex system.
24:25You can see the line, look.
24:27Oh, yes, yes, yes.
24:28It should have come to there, so he's left it.
24:30If it had been the other way, if it had come to here,
24:32we'd have been in serious trouble.
24:37I want somebody who knows what they're doing to come round there.
24:40Are you going that way, Karl?
24:43It's a great image of the kind of medieval farmers of Gimlet going,
24:47I want somebody who knows what he's doing.
24:49You go down to the sheep's bottom and you go up to Blackwell's Seek.
24:55Today, the Laxton field jury meets in the Dovecote Inn.
24:59We've got, up at the top of the map,
25:01we've got the old Mott & Bailey castle site
25:04where the Lord of the Manor lived.
25:07We've got Westfield, Millfield and Southfield.
25:12And the way this developed was that so people had got
25:15a fair share of good land and bad land,
25:17they'd come here and they'd go to Blackwell's Seek.
25:20The way this developed was that so people had got
25:22a fair share of good land and bad land.
25:24It was a way of distributing the land
25:26so it was equal and fair to everybody.
25:30One is always fallow, one is then followed by wheat
25:34and then the third field is always a spring-sown crop.
25:37And then the woodland forms our parish boundary
25:40so you can see how the rural landscape developed
25:42from the centre of the village out into the countryside.
25:47What findings have we got off Millfield?
25:50We've got Johnny Godson here on Langwell's Seek,
25:53not ploughed far enough.
25:55Langwell's Seek? Langwell, yes.
25:57This is how the Kibworth jury worked during the Middle Ages.
26:00Then we've got Ivan Rayner on, well, I don't know what you call it,
26:05top of Westwood Edge there next to it, ploughed too far.
26:09About a foot.
26:11Final one. Final one.
26:15It's fairly... It's fairly blatant.
26:18Yeah, it is, yeah. So we're going to find him.
26:20Go on then, I'm open, what we put in?
26:2250 quid.
26:25But this is much more than a quaint survival.
26:29You're watching the roots of the English system.
26:32Fiver. All in agreement.
26:35Co-operation, respect for your neighbours
26:38and the idea of fairness, that good old Anglo-Saxon word.
26:45MUSIC PLAYS
26:50The Kibworth documents from the 13th century in Merton College
26:54paint the same scene.
26:56Easter 1270.
26:58Meeting of the manor court of Kibworth Harcourt.
27:02Grant of land to Robert, the son of Richard the Parson.
27:06Eight acres in Kibworth Fields divided as follows.
27:11One acre on Little Hill, near Roger White's strip.
27:16One rood upon Rayland, near the land Rob Joy holds.
27:21Three roods at Walwarts, near the land Hugh Hertlebole holds.
27:26One acre that sticks into Pease Hill Seek,
27:29next to the strip of land held by Nicholas, son of Simon the Reed.
27:33One and a half roods on Pease Croft, near Rob Joyce's land.
27:39Back then, the Kibworth jury probably met not in the alehouse,
27:43but in the church.
27:46Everything happens here. It's the focus of the parish.
27:50Parish officers are the public officials of the day.
27:54People meet here to sign contracts, get married in the porch.
27:58And that's particularly important, of course,
28:01when you've got a settlement with more than one manor,
28:04three or four manors, as is the case here.
28:07The parish church is where the whole community comes together.
28:12It's the powerhouse of the community in many, many ways.
28:16Witnessed here at Kibworth Church by Robert Knoll,
28:21Henry Wisehard, Richard the Huntsman,
28:24William Gunsey, Ivan, son of Roger of Kibworth,
28:28Sylvester, the village scribe.
28:32The 12th and 13th centuries were a boom time in England.
28:36In our big dig with the villagers,
28:38we dug an unprecedented 55 test pits across the village.
28:47And after scanty evidence for the Romans, Saxons and Vikings,
28:51suddenly the village seems to become richer and more populous.
28:56As the Norman occupation opened new trade links with Europe.
29:03Back in Cambridge, Carenza Lewis was now processing all the evidence
29:07that the villagers had gathered from their test pits.
29:10Take us on from 1066 to the next couple of hundred years.
29:14How does it look in the ground?
29:16It's very interesting, actually, really quite dramatic.
29:19When we get into the post-Norman period, look how it changes.
29:22Huge explosion of growth in all of the villages, really.
29:25Certainly, Kibworth Harcourt, that looks like a nucleated village.
29:28By nucleated village, you're talking about, you know,
29:31a street with houses along the street, a church.
29:34There's a kind of nucleus and the fields are outside.
29:37This is what you're seeing for the first time, perhaps, is it?
29:40I think absolutely. I mean, you can look at Kibworth Harcourt.
29:43There's a street running along there.
29:45Every single test pit just about that we dug along both sides of the road
29:50is producing pottery.
29:52It's a populous place. Absolutely.
29:57And Kibworth was also a place
29:59where travel and communications were developed.
30:04Take the A6, the bane of all Kibworth people's lives today.
30:08It was made a turnpike in the 18th century,
30:11but it starts in the 12th century,
30:14linking the village with Leicester and London.
30:20The village was doing well.
30:23And in March 1223,
30:25the king awarded Kibworth Beecham a licence for a market.
30:31King Henry to the Sheriff of Leicester,
30:34we grant to our trusty and well-beloved Walter de Beecham
30:40that he may have a market in Kibworth on Wednesdays,
30:47providing that that market does not prove a nuisance
30:51to other merchants in the region.
31:00And at our history day in Kibworth High School,
31:03an unexpected source of new evidence came up
31:06for the beginnings of this boom time from local metal detectorists.
31:10You didn't pick up any coins from that period, did you?
31:14I've had to find it. I've got an Ethelred II.
31:18Ah, Ethelred the Unready.
31:20That's the one.
31:22It's only a half cut.
31:25They cut them in half from a penny for currency?
31:27Yeah, they're actually made with a voided cross,
31:30so you can cut across the line.
31:32So the Normans took over an already sophisticated coinage system,
31:37and in the next period there's a flood of finds
31:40telling us about wealth and travel.
31:43Probably from Walsingham.
31:45You know, you've got this sort of plants there
31:48that I interpret at least as a sort of a lily pot on there,
31:52which is to do with the Annunciation, the Blessed Virgin.
31:56And then on the other side, a crown.
31:59Henry III gave a golden crown to the wonder-working image
32:02of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Walsingham,
32:04so that fits.
32:06Fantastic. Absolutely amazing.
32:09So somebody's got an Islamic coin and turned it into a brooch.
32:15I can't read Arabic script, I'm afraid. I'm ashamed to say.
32:19I didn't think it would be a drawback in the history of Kibbutz,
32:22but, you know, constant surprises here.
32:26So the economy boomed, the population more than doubled,
32:30markets opened everywhere and the common law developed.
32:34Even the poorest English men and women had rights as well as obligations.
32:39At this point in the tale,
32:41the community of the village becomes part of the community of the realm.
32:47In the early 1200s, new laws began to restrain rulers like King John.
32:53Most famous was Magna Carta.
32:55But among them, one was especially important to the people of the village
32:59because it made them more free to use their own countryside.
33:04It's called the Charter of the Forest.
33:07It talks about their liberties and their rights,
33:10which had been held before in England.
33:14English people hark back to their Anglo-Saxon past as a time when,
33:19so they believed, they had all these common rights and common laws
33:24which had been eroded during the period of rule since 1066.
33:30In 1264, these conflicts came to a head in civil war.
33:36The barons had forced great reforms on King Henry III,
33:39which were published now not only in French,
33:42but in the people's language, English.
33:44Among the rebels was the Lord of Kibworth, Sire de Harcourt.
33:48The rebel army confronted the king at Lewes in Sussex.
33:52No other country in Europe had gone so far and so early
33:58in attempting to reduce the king to a constitutional monarch.
34:04To force the king to rule according to custom and law,
34:07to consult not only with his great nobles,
34:10but with the representatives of the shires, shires like Leicestershire.
34:16The leader of the barons was the French-speaking Earl of Leicester,
34:21Simon de Montfort, an unlikely people's champion.
34:25He gives a speech to the army.
34:28He's a great speaker, de Montfort, epigrammatic and forceful.
34:32Somewhere on this spot,
34:34you're fighting for England, he says now, for honour, for God,
34:39for the Blessed Virgin Mary and the saints and the Holy Church.
34:43This revolution is almost a religious crusade to him.
34:51The clash was brief and savage.
34:54The wall was broken.
34:56Peasant soldiers cut the throats of knights in armour.
35:02The victory of Simon de Montfort here at Lewes
35:05unleashed a surge of elation among many
35:09of some an almost revolutionary fervour.
35:14"'England can once again breathe the air of freedom,'
35:18wrote a poet in 1264.
35:21"'But liberty is theirs,
35:23"'and Englishmen who were once despised like dogs
35:27"'can now walk with their heads held high,
35:30"'their oppressors overthrown.'"
35:35So, two centuries after the Norman conquest,
35:38the English people once more found their voice.
35:43All generations quarry the past for defining moments of identity,
35:48but for the English people, de Montfort was one.
36:00Simon de Montfort had seized power from the king
36:04and carried through gigantic reforms of the realm.
36:11He sent a justicia, a legal official, round the kingdom
36:14to hear everybody's complaints, even from the lowliest peasant.
36:17And some of the legislation,
36:19the abolition of various impositions, various types of fine,
36:23were directly designed to benefit the peasantry.
36:25So you can see that the peasants themselves
36:27believe passionately in these kinds of reforms.
36:30And I think particularly this area, this area of Leicestershire,
36:33South Leicestershire, is very radicalised politically
36:36and very informed.
36:38The peasants know what's going on.
36:42And almost miraculously,
36:44we've got a glimpse of that heady summer of 1264 from Kibweth itself.
36:51A month after the Battle of Lewes,
36:53the villagers went on their annual local pilgrimage
36:56to the ancient church of St Mary Arden,
36:59five miles away at Great Bowden.
37:03Pilgrimage is hard-wired into our DNA.
37:0799.9% of pilgrimages in the Middle Ages were local ones.
37:14Every parish has a place outside the village,
37:18outside the centre of settlement, where people will go.
37:31And that summer day in 1264,
37:34the people of Great Bowden, who were royalists,
37:37met the villagers of Kibweth with axes.
37:44The King is here, Jimmy.
37:47Oh, that's great, that's great. Hello, everybody.
37:51Ah, see, the Bowden people have come armed with their axes.
37:54What followed is a tiny moment in a bitter civil war,
37:58but it shows how deep the passions ran even at local level.
38:02Are we meant to be afraid now?
38:04No, no, you're friends now because you're wearing the badge.
38:08Oh, gorgeous.
38:10Of course, the King has been defeated at the Battle of Lewes
38:13in the previous month.
38:15The people of Kibweth come on their customary...
38:18whatever it is, pilgrimage or whatever,
38:20Graham's going to try and elucidate this for us,
38:23and when they try to go into the church, as was their custom,
38:28then some of the people of Bowden,
38:31led by this guy called William King,
38:33a suitable name for a royal estate, barred their way,
38:37and then an axe was produced.
38:40Come and have a look at the church first.
38:43The man at the centre of the fracca
38:45came from a well-known Kibweth peasant family.
38:48He was called John Woddard.
38:50He's later found with Montfort's army down in Kent.
38:58Brought this back from Stoke Albany some years ago and put it here.
39:02Was it not originally?
39:04Oh, it was originally, but it was taken over there for care while...
39:07The people of Kibweth at Great Bowden
39:09are now restoring this 17th-century chapel,
39:12which was built from the remains of what was once
39:15the medieval mother church of Kibweth.
39:18If you imagine going back and back and back,
39:21this great yard must have many, many thousands of burials in it.
39:27It's a huge churchyard.
39:30It's far, far bigger than one would need
39:33for a commoner garden village church.
39:36The reason is that St Mary in Arden is the regional mother church.
39:42A really important place in their religious calendar.
39:47When the people of Kibweth are coming here, it's Whit Monday.
39:52There were earlier processions of this type,
39:55not just Pentecost, but probably Easter,
39:58made by daughter churches of Anglo-Saxon ministers
40:02to their mother church.
40:05Nowadays, at Easter, like you said,
40:08the clergy gather at the cathedral where the oil is blessed,
40:12and that's the chrism oil as well,
40:15and the clergy take it with them into the parishes.
40:18That's what's happening nowadays.
40:20It always seems to be the same.
40:22One parish is trying to keep another parish behind it in the procession.
40:26They're competing for the privilege of going first into the church.
40:31There may be two dozen parishes converging on this place,
40:36and for a ceremony which was full of movement
40:39and light and sound and joyousness,
40:42because Pentecost is the birthday of Christ's church.
40:46Did they walk barefoot? Was there a particular tradition?
40:49Did you carry banners?
40:51You certainly carried banners. You were representing your parish.
40:54So when somebody tries to tell you to get back in the queue,
40:58the local patriotism takes over, I suspect.
41:01I think anger, actually, probably, because if the king was captured,
41:05and this was the king's estate still at that time,
41:09so they would feel absolutely furious and really red-raw with rage.
41:14And so it may have been a religious procession,
41:18but the people in Bowdoin could have felt quite differently about it
41:21and very, very angry, and I think that's what it was.
41:24And they come tooled up!
41:27They still do! They still do!
41:30They had axes, axes hanging at their belt.
41:38In the National Archive,
41:40the record survives to tell us what happened here that day.
41:46When the men of Kipworth came to the church of Harborough
41:49to make their procession there,
41:51the foresaid William King of Bowdoin
41:54came to prevent them from proceeding into the church
41:58and struck the foresaid Waddard with an axe and kill him if he could.
42:03And the foresaid John Waddard, perceiving this,
42:06turned round and struck the foresaid William in the head with an axe,
42:10so he afterwards died of that blow.
42:16And the jury actually loaded with people from Kipworth...
42:21..seems to have concluded that it was self-defence.
42:29One of the things which has really emerged, I think,
42:32from recent work on this whole period
42:34is the way peasants were radicalised
42:36and took part in the actual fighting.
42:38They both took part in raid and counter-raid,
42:41in the bands of Montfortians burning villages in surrounding areas,
42:45but they also fought in the great battles.
42:47I mean, I would have thought Waddard was very likely in his troop
42:50at the various battles, and we may think probably of contingents from Kipworth,
42:55peasant contingents from Kipworth, physically on the fighting side.
43:01That summer, de Montfort summoned a great peasant army from all over England,
43:06including John Waddard of Kipworth, to repel a French invasion.
43:10But that was the high point of the revolution.
43:13The following year, it was crushed at Evesham.
43:18MUSIC PLAYS
43:27The rebels had fallen out among themselves.
43:32And finally, de Montfort was trapped by his enemies.
43:39De Montfort arrived here in Evesham at six o'clock in the morning
43:42and his army were desperate for rest.
43:45But soon afterwards, they became aware that out on the green hill there,
43:50a large army was arriving.
43:55De Montfort sent his barber, Nicholas, up the abbey tower to see who they were.
44:00Nicholas was an expert in heraldry.
44:03When they reached the top of the hill, they unfurled their royalist standards,
44:08and Nicholas knew exactly who they were.
44:11God save our souls, he said, for we are dead men.
44:17In the final battle, de Montfort was hopelessly outnumbered.
44:22And here we are on a 13th-century battlefield.
44:28Why doesn't Montfort try to escape?
44:31He just wasn't made like that.
44:33He was a man of rigid discipline, both for himself and for his cause.
44:41In fact, he believed he was doing God's work.
44:44This is what he convinced himself of doing.
44:46So the revolution was God's work.
44:48The constitutional revolution was God's work in his eyes.
44:51It was, yes. That's amazing.
44:54And, of course, when people become convinced that they're doing God's work,
44:59they're capable of anything.
45:01And when they got up here and they could see what they were really facing,
45:06they panicked and fled in all directions.
45:10What happens to Simon himself then at this moment?
45:12Well, he's very quickly surrounded by his enemies.
45:16His horse is killed under him,
45:18and it's said that he was struck through the neck by a lance.
45:22Pretty nasty thing.
45:24And he, of course, fell to the ground.
45:27And people were so fired up at this point
45:30that his enemies pounced upon the body and chopped it up.
45:34Chopped all the arms and legs, head, and the private parts as well.
45:39They were all chopped off.
45:44The same thing happened to all those people who'd fled.
45:48The rest of the day, they were chased all over the landscape,
45:52wherever they could be found, and killed.
45:58Some people got into the town and thought,
46:01oh, we'll hide in the abbey, we'll be safe there.
46:04But they weren't. They were killed in the abbey.
46:07The high altar itself was splashed with blood.
46:10Bodies lay everywhere. It was the most appalling scene.
46:17Did John Waddard of Kibworth die here?
46:20We'll never know.
46:22This is the traditional spot where Simon was killed, isn't it?
46:27The site of Simon's death immediately became a place of pilgrimage.
46:32And people of all walks of life came here from all over England,
46:36including peasants from around Kibworth, seeking miracles.
46:40People came from far and wide to make use of this water,
46:44which they believed had miraculous powers.
46:47A real emotional response to his defeat,
46:51welling up among ordinary people,
46:54for whom the revolution had meant something, even though it failed.
46:59So it's a window, a brief window, which closes after about ten years
47:04into what ordinary people were inspired by at the time.
47:08And even in remote places like Kibworth,
47:12it was the talk of the village,
47:15what Earl Simon is going to do for us,
47:18and, well, what are we going to do now he's gone?
47:25MUSIC PLAYS
47:38After the battle, the king's men swept into the villages around Kibworth,
47:43which had supported de Montfort.
47:46Sayer de Harcourt was captured and thrown into jail,
47:49and the king's assessors made an inventory of his estates.
47:54This is the... November 1265, this is.
48:00Full of anger and bitterness towards Sayer de Harcourt,
48:04the king demands to know what he possesses in his manor of Kibworth,
48:08how much arable and meadow, how many freeholders and villains.
48:14The condition of the manor house, the dovecot and the windmill.
48:19And its annual taxable income.
48:24And in this time of vengeance, close to Kibworth,
48:28we can hear the voice of the peasants themselves.
48:32At Peatling Magna, a royalist called Peter de Neville
48:36sends a troop of men through the village.
48:39And the peasants stop them.
48:43They try and prevent them going through the village.
48:46And what Peter de Neville actually says,
48:48or alleges that they actually said, was that,
48:51why are we doing this?
48:52It's because you're committing all sorts of seditions and treasons,
48:56because you're acting against the utility
48:59of the community of the kingdom and against the baron.
49:03The utility, the welfare of the community of the realm?
49:07Of the realm.
49:09DOG BARKS
49:17De Neville was in a cold fury and threatened to burn the village down.
49:22Men took shelter inside the church.
49:24And a small group of the villagers, mainly women,
49:27stood out here and argued with the king's men.
49:30And they were led by a woman, by Mrs Pillerton,
49:34the wife of one of the peasants.
49:38Oh, that's so beautiful, isn't it?
49:40She said to the king's men that they were guilty of heinous treachery
49:45and other crimes because they were against the barons
49:49and they were against the welfare of the community of the realm.
49:54I can imagine her as a fairly buxom, sturdy, real woman of the soil
49:59and certainly very, very determined.
50:02But she was backed up by her other women.
50:04I believe the record says that the women pleaded with Peter's men.
50:09So you can imagine them.
50:10And they'd promise anything, really, protect their families.
50:13We would, wouldn't we, Margaret?
50:25The king spared Ser de Harcourt's life
50:28but imposed a huge fine for his treachery.
50:32So Ser was forced to put the manor of Cibwith Harcourt up for sale.
50:37With its new windmill, its dovecote, its freemen and villains
50:42and its 1,400 acres of prime arable,
50:45a fine piece of medieval real estate.
50:53And with that, a new character enters our story.
50:57Merton College, Oxford.
51:00The college had recently been founded by Walter of Merton,
51:03a supporter of the king whose lands in Surrey
51:06had been plundered in the war by de Montfort's troops.
51:10Simon de Montfort has lost and is dead
51:14and therefore Walter de Merton knows that he's on the winning side.
51:20And so all the lands of the Montfortians,
51:24of whom Ser de Harcourt was one,
51:27are in a poor way and heavily indebted.
51:31There's a document in the National Archive
51:34where the king says,
51:36I have put aside my anger and rancour towards the Ser de Harcourt
51:41and a swenging fine will do instead.
51:45So he has to sell up, basically, because he's been ruined.
51:49And Walter de Merton, who now realises he's on the right side,
51:53seizes the moment.
51:56And as he's the former chancellor of Henry III,
52:00he's in a good position
52:04and pays off these debts and buys...
52:09It's interesting, he buys first the advowsen of the chapel
52:15and then, three days later,
52:18he buys the manor in 1270, October 1270.
52:23This document, I think he doesn't...
52:25He used some word like...
52:27It's my old friend.
52:29Oh, yes!
52:30My dear old friend. Yes, yes, yes!
52:34Walter, perhaps, was sensitive to the passionate feelings
52:37aroused by the failed revolution.
52:39Best, perhaps, let bygones be bygones.
52:46This is what you've really come to see.
52:49Wow, that's just wonderful.
52:54Wow. So when was this built, Julian?
52:56It was finished in 1291 and it was built to be fireproof.
53:00A stone roof. You see, there's no wood in the roof
53:02and there's no wood in the floor. It's all stone and tile.
53:05State-of-the-art for the late 13th century.
53:09And here are 750 years of the records of Kibworth Harcourt,
53:14an almost unbelievable treasure trove of the social life of the village.
53:20And they even have Sayer's sale document.
53:24I cannot believe that it's so...
53:28Whose seal is that, then?
53:30That was de Harcourt, I think.
53:32That's de Harcourt's seal.
53:34Here's the text.
53:36Sayer is de Harcourt.
53:38Sends greetings.
53:40And then saying he's conceded and by his charter confirmed.
53:45Absolutely great.
53:47My dear friend.
53:49Taking the shirt off my back, but he's my dear friend and fellow.
53:52LAUGHTER
54:08Across the courtyard is the early 14th-century college library.
54:16Isn't this wonderful?
54:18The oldest continuously functioning library in the world.
54:24And here is the earliest complete survey of Kibworth and its people.
54:29The magic of the parchment trail.
54:32It's one of those medieval documents where the life of the past
54:36and the life of the people of the past just comes leaping off the page.
54:40It's a list drawn up by the estate managers of Merton College
54:44in the 1280s.
54:46It's the first description of the village of Kibworth-Harcourt.
54:50And in it are listed all the families of the village.
54:53The Poleys, we can trace them over 15 generations.
54:57The Browns, one branch of whose family will become aldermen
55:02in Coventry and wear the ermine.
55:04A fabulous case of medieval social climbing.
55:09There are 11 free tenants and their families.
55:13There's 27 customary tenants.
55:15They're people who owed part of their labour to their lord.
55:19There's seven cottagers, people who did jobs in the village.
55:22Washerwoman or the thresher.
55:24And there's a dozen other families who have no land.
55:28Wonderful snapshot of the village.
55:31Suddenly, with this, the village and its people come to life.
55:37And who better to introduce the Kibworth people of the past
55:40than today's villagers?
55:43Emma Gilbert, villain.
55:46Robert, the doctor.
55:50Alice Starr, Matilda Starr.
55:53Sisters!
55:56Robert the thresher, cottageholder.
55:59Beatrice Sybil, villain.
56:02Beatrice Sybil, villain.
56:04Henry Pole, freeman.
56:06Richard Pole, freeman.
56:08John Pole, villain.
56:10Cousins!
56:13Alice, the washerwoman.
56:16Robert the broker.
56:18Scholastica, villain and widow.
56:20John Goodyear, villain.
56:22Hugh Bond, villain.
56:24Will Reins.
56:26Henry Button, freeman.
56:33CHATTER
56:38And for almost 750 years, the relationship has continued.
56:43On behalf of the college choir, can I say what a very great pleasure it is
56:47for us to be with you this evening
56:49and to bring greetings from the warden and fellows at Merton.
56:53Our founder, Walter de Merton, will be pleased to know
56:56that the relationship between his college and Kibworth
57:00is alive and well today.
57:03Ladies and gentlemen, the choir of Merton College, Oxford.
57:07APPLAUSE
57:14CHOIR SINGS
57:31CHOIR SINGS
57:34So that's how Merton College became the lord of the manor of Kibworth Harcourt
57:39after the triumphs and the tragedies of the Baron's War.
57:43By that time in the 1260s, the people of Kibworth
57:47have already known Roman lords, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans.
57:53So how will it fare now with an Oxford college?
57:57And how will the villagers cope with the horrors that lie ahead in the 14th century,
58:02the most catastrophic in our history?
58:05That's the next chapter of the story.
58:13APPLAUSE
58:19Next in the story of England, the Great Famine and the Black Death,
58:24times of trial and times of hope.
58:30Are you a local person?
58:44Somebody must have a fabulous sense of humour.
58:54MUSIC