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00:00In a village in the heart of England we're tracing the tale of one community through
00:07the whole of our history.
00:08We've got something that's possibly prehistoric.
00:11Yeah?
00:12Oh, we've lost it.
00:13Don't say that.
00:14Don't say that.
00:15The village is Kibworth in Leicestershire.
00:19When we get into the post-Norman period, look how it changes.
00:22Huge explosion of growth.
00:24With science, history and archaeology, we're seeing how the story of the village is also
00:29the story of the nation.
00:30This area of south Leicestershire is very radicalised politically.
00:34You're fighting for England, he says.
00:39They were killed in the abbey.
00:41The high altar itself was splashed with blood.
00:44To help us, we've got wonderful village archives.
00:47I think this is what we've really come to see.
00:52From the 13th century we can tell the stories of individual peasant families over the generations.
00:59Suddenly, with this, the village and its people come to life.
01:04In the documents, everyday tales of medieval lives.
01:08Emma Gilbert, Villain.
01:10Robert, the Doctor.
01:13Alice Starr.
01:14Matilda Starr.
01:16Sisters.
01:20So how will the villagers cope with the horrors that lie ahead in the 14th century, the most
01:25catastrophic in our history?
01:28That's the next chapter of this story.
01:58In the next stage of our search, I've come to ask the housekeeper if she can tell us
02:28the help of the children at Kibworth High School.
02:35Imagine that is the A6, yeah?
02:40Now the A6 is an ancient road, but it takes a modern little turn through Kibworth Harcourt
02:45and the original village street goes something like this, yeah?
02:50I'm asking the children to dig archaeological test pits to find out more about the village
02:55in the early 14th century.
02:58We're going to put our pits in the memorial garden and along there.
03:07We've already dug 55 pits across the village, but we need to know more.
03:11So first of all, we're going to take out all the plants and that, so many of these will
03:16have quite...
03:16So now we've targeted the area behind the medieval marketplace and in the gardens behind
03:21two of the old farmhouses.
03:24Back in England as a whole, the village had a boom time, up to 1300.
03:31In 1300, Kibworth Parish consisted of the hamlet of Smeet and Westerby and the two main
03:38manors of Kibworth Beecham and Kibworth Harcourt.
03:42Maybe 1,000 people in all, free men and women, serfs and villains.
03:49But the length of them is very impressive, isn't it?
03:51There's quite a lot of land in that back area there, which is obviously agricultural.
03:57And maybe one housing plot here, possibly, or two.
04:02What do you make of the house, first of all?
04:03Any instant impressions there?
04:05The way you analyse a building like this is to count the bays, that is the distance between
04:10the upright timbers.
04:12So you've got one, two, three, four bays, and each bay is roughly 15 feet long.
04:20So by 1600, it's a jolly nice farmer's house, but back in the 1300, maybe more than one
04:28family of villains.
04:29What would a villain have had on this plot?
04:32Well, villains are not very privileged people, they're unfree, so they have to go to the
04:38Lord's Court, and it's the Lord's Court which rules over their lives.
04:43In Kibworth Harcourt, they had 12 acres of land each, a holding of 12 acres of land.
04:51Beyond the village boundary, in the open field.
04:56Both the Kibworths and Smeaton were open-field villages.
05:01Each of the great fields was divided into many small strips, which were shared out and
05:06farmed communally by the peasants and their families.
05:13To keep the fields fertile, the peasants carted out all the manure from their barns
05:17and yards, with whatever debris was mixed up in it.
05:23So today, we're searching for medieval rubbish.
05:37Most of it gets here because they have a midden, they have a muck heap in the yard behind the
05:42house, they put every bit of rubbish onto it, and it all gets shoveled onto a cart
05:47called a tumbrel.
05:52And then when you get into the field, you pull a lever and the stuff gets dumped onto
05:55the field, and you're spreading, along with half a tonne of manure, you're spreading
06:00pieces of broken pottery.
06:02Which we gave so much to, I'm not picking up again.
06:06It was back-breaking work, but it was the way of life for our ancestors, men and women,
06:12for 800 years.
06:14When you plot this stuff, you can see the scatters of Stamford ware from the late Saxon
06:19period when these field systems were first laid out, you can see the early medieval,
06:23the late medieval, and quite often the early post-med, the late post-med, depending on
06:28when it's enclosed.
06:30What would you have seen standing here in 1300?
06:33100% cultivation, really.
06:36A very boring landscape, really, because it's all brown in the autumn, it's all yellow
06:43in the summer, you know, it's very, very heavily cultivated.
06:49How does Nicholas Polly know that his strip is different from Walter Peake's and from
06:55the...
06:56Well, at the end of the strip, imagining this edge, which of course wasn't there then, as
07:01a headland at the end of the strip, you would have some sort of marker, and it could be
07:07a wooden post, it could be a stone, later on the stone might even have an initial on
07:12it, you know, P for Pooley or whatever.
07:15I've recently discovered that in Yorkshire they had holes.
07:19They were so mean in Yorkshire that they just, they didn't have a post or a stone, they just
07:23dug a little hole, and that marks the boundary.
07:31And this way of life, hand ploughing with animals, continued all over England well into
07:36the 20th century.
07:41The open field system was not only labour intensive, it took a huge amount of mental
07:46effort to memorise all the intimate detail of the fields and strips.
07:54Most of that knowledge is lost now, but not at Kibworth.
07:59Because back in 1300, the farmers of Kibworth Harcourt gave every detail of their land and
08:04lives to the new landlords, Merton College, Oxford.
08:09The field itself is Eastfield, and it gives us, in English, Estfield.
08:14This is strip by strip, with the furlongs being named, and the local jury writing this
08:20down as they see it.
08:25I've got the later names of the field strips here in the Eastfield.
08:30The Long Coombs Furlong, the Blackland Furlong, Stonehill Furlong.
08:36Yes, we have Stonehill here.
08:39Stonehull.
08:40Two ceilings.
08:41So two strips on the two strips.
08:44And of course, the perfect name, it would remind you, it's the stony bit of land up
08:48the top of the field.
08:52Long Hoe and Short Hoe, and Hernseek Furlong, Berridge Home Furlong, Sleadwong.
09:07Names and customs, the pattern of the landscape in the minds of the people, handed down for
09:141,000 years.
09:18Broadwong.
09:19Broadwong.
09:20Down here.
09:21Five strips.
09:22That is just so fantastic.
09:25Now, these strips of parchment have Ex parte Umbra and Ex parte Solis, on the shady side
09:34and on the sunny side.
09:37That's the way the jury remember the strips.
09:43By memorising the fields as the sun goes round like that.
09:46So it is orientation.
09:47As you go round...
09:48Horse...
09:49Horse.
09:50Horsehill.
09:51That top part is...
09:53There is research being done on.
10:03These are cameras, this is the real thing, darling.
10:07Nobody is faking this.
10:15In an agricultural community like medieval Kibworth,
10:18the most important man was the ploughman
10:21and the most important animals were the oxen.
10:26Come on, Grouse, walk.
10:27They bred them, cared for them, lived with them.
10:30Walk on.
10:32And in Weald and Darnlend Open Air Museum,
10:35they're doing a fascinating piece of experimental archaeology,
10:38training young oxen ready to take the plough.
10:42For the small paw family, you couldn't have what you term as an oxen,
10:46a male, a castrated male,
10:48standing around all year doing nothing.
10:50So, they work the cows, the females.
10:55You can have a calf and you can milk it.
10:58So, it's a multi-purpose animal.
11:00And if you only had one cow, your neighbour had a cow,
11:05you'd put the two together.
11:06If another neighbour had a pony,
11:08then you can put the pony on the front and have a three-team.
11:12So, they used everything they could.
11:15Come on.
11:17Gee back.
11:20So, do they know when they're being talked to, do they individually?
11:22They do, yes.
11:24Yeah, they've...
11:25Each pair has the same letter.
11:29So, these two are Rose and Ruby
11:31and the ones behind us are Gwen and Graceful.
11:35It's a single-syllable name, nearside, this side,
11:38and double-syllable, offside.
11:41I mean, the most we know, recorded, put together, was 86.
11:4686?
11:4786, yeah.
11:49Yeah, and that was to move a windmill.
11:53They moved a windmill from the centre of Brighton to Regency Square
11:56and they moved it up onto the South Downs.
12:00In the Middle Ages, the ploughmen are quite charismatic figures,
12:04you know, famous ploughmen in their patchwork coats.
12:08And the fictional Pears Ploughman becomes a kind of English everyman,
12:13subject to the tide of popular song and social protest poetry
12:18through the 14th century,
12:20because, as the ballad-makers said,
12:22on his shoulders rested the mirth of all the land.
12:27And God speed well, the plough was not just a proverb,
12:31it was a heartfelt prayer.
12:34Get on with it.
12:36Rose, come on, walk on.
12:39Rose.
12:42Rose, come on.
12:46Now, if you were a free man or woman,
12:48you ploughed your own fields, paid rent and sold your surplus after tax.
12:54But if you were an unfree peasant, a villane, a cotter or a serf,
12:59you also owed your lord service,
13:02and that could be a real burden.
13:05Whoa!
13:07Survey of the Manor of Kidworth.
13:09It's dues and services and...
13:11Customs. And customs.
13:13So this is Merton recording the community
13:16pretty soon after they've got hold of it.
13:18That's right. Obviously, the college wants to know, you know,
13:21what its dues are and what comes to it,
13:24and what its, to some extent, its liabilities are, I suppose, to the tenants.
13:29And here are the dues.
13:31Now, this is what peasants owed here.
13:34And not just in money, but in services.
13:39Two days ploughing each year without food, bringing your own plough.
13:49Gathering straw together for roofing the buildings of the manor court
13:53whenever needed.
13:55Carrying the lord's corn to Leicester Market on your own horse,
13:59but no further.
14:00Unless it be within the county.
14:03Walk on.
14:04Carrying coal within the county.
14:06Using your own cart.
14:10Two days mowing the lord's meadow with one man.
14:13Two days harrowing and hoeing with food provided.
14:17Reaping four days.
14:22The men of the village to mow the lord's meadow
14:25with a gift of one shilling and sixpence in beer.
14:31And on 1,300 prices, that was enough to get you very drunk.
14:38So, from the 1270s, the Merton Archive
14:41gives us the most incredible detail on Kibworth Harcourt.
14:45We can trace everybody in the village from then until now,
14:47virtually, into family trees of peasants for 15 generations.
14:51But what about Kibworth Beecham and Smeaton Westerby?
14:55Well, the missing gap is here in parish and county history,
15:00of Leicestershire, of the antiquarian William Burton.
15:04It's one of the earliest of the county histories,
15:07and it contains our first historical accounts
15:11of the Kibworths and Smeaton.
15:14Published in 1622.
15:16Same year, the same publisher and the same printer
15:20as Shakespeare's Folio.
15:23Of course, it's obsessed, as you'd expect, with manorial history,
15:26but what's really interesting about this
15:28is that Burton's notes survive,
15:31and they're an altogether different matter.
15:35Here they are.
15:37They were written down in 1615,
15:40copied from the ancient original membranes by me, W. Burton.
15:4615th of July, 1615.
15:49He excerpted the great rolls of the Survey of 1279,
15:54the most detailed survey of England ever done before modern times.
15:58They're lost now, but here, largely unpublished in his notebooks,
16:04are the first detailed accounts,
16:06not only of Kibworth Harcourt,
16:10but Kibworth Beecham and Smeaton Westerby.
16:15Starting with Smeaton, here for the first time
16:18are the names of families in the village,
16:19and some of them very long-lasting families in the village story.
16:23The Allans and the Astons,
16:27very long-lasting names in that part of Leicestershire,
16:30and indeed in Kibworth.
16:32When you turn to Beecham, though, nearly everybody unfree.
16:36There's about 45 families of villains and serfs.
16:431315.
16:44It had two mills, one water and one wind.
16:47Oh, did it? Yes, how about that?
16:50But attached to it, 200 acres of land,
16:53so that must have been... Yes, that piece down there, straight down, yes.
16:57All the way across to... To Smeaton. To Smeaton. Yes.
17:00It's always called the old house in the middle of the village.
17:04And you had... You had, I'm sorry.
17:07You had a communal bread oven out in the village street.
17:11So, again, the villagers brought their corn to make bread.
17:15A little cut of that went to the manor house.
17:17Four free tenants, 24 villains,
17:21each one with a cottage and 15 acres,
17:23and 18 serfs, who were the lowest level kind of peasantry.
17:28Wow.
17:30So the Beecham half of Kibworth was still unfree,
17:34as it had been back in 1066.
17:41That's how things stood in Kibworth, at the height of the feudal system.
17:46The population of the parish at well over 1,000,
17:49now as high as it will get until Victorian times.
17:53This is context two, yeah?
17:54Yeah, and this is the out of a... Out of a pit.
17:57Yeah.
17:58On Main Street, the kids have not yet got down
18:00to the level of the medieval marketplace.
18:03The long bones and the ribs.
18:05Different things.
18:07We love you, baby.
18:08But for the field walkers, there were easy pickings
18:10from the once teeming medieval fields.
18:13There's certainly stuff from the 13th, 14th century.
18:19And in Cambridge,
18:20Carenza Lewis is collating the evidence from our earlier test pits,
18:24showing the growth of the village up to the boom time before 1300.
18:28...to areas of settlement.
18:30Here, the villages that we can see today seem to be taking off.
18:34This is the point where we can see the villages we know today
18:36starting to have their direct origins.
18:39Smeaton West to be again,
18:41that the longest-occupied village is clearly continuing to prosper.
18:44The other really significant place we've got
18:46is up here in Kibwith Harcourt.
18:48You can actually see the village growing.
18:50I mean, that is Kibwith Harcourt extending along the street there.
18:53Pottery coming out of virtually every test pit there.
18:56And not much in Kibwith Beecham.
18:57You know, there's an old village legend
19:00that kind of Harcourt is the kind of posh, rather well-to-do end,
19:03and Beecham's always the poor end.
19:05But you wouldn't ever find that hinted at in the pottery, would you, Carenza?
19:10Well, that's what's so fascinating...
19:11Fantasy or...?
19:12Well, that's what's so fascinating about this period
19:13is you've got these two strands of evidence
19:15that we can use to sort of reflect off each other, really.
19:19And, I mean, it is interesting, isn't it,
19:20that in the light of that knowledge, you can look at this map
19:23and think, well, there's very much less here.
19:31It's funny, isn't it, how history can leave its mark.
19:33In Victorian times,
19:34the villagers even argued about separate sewage systems.
19:38Harcourt and Beecham had different doors in the church
19:41and even separate parts of the graveyard.
19:46This is the surviving windmill at Kibweth Harcourt.
19:50They had two here and two over in Kibweth Beecham.
19:54It's a post mill.
19:55You turned it on its central post,
19:57using this wooden tail to face the wind.
20:01This was new technology that had spread over England in the 13th century
20:05to feed the booming population.
20:08There's more than 1,500 people.
20:11But here in Kibweth, as across England, the boom time was over.
20:16There were too many mouths to feed, not enough jobs,
20:19too many poor people desperately struggling to survive on marginal land.
20:24And around 1300, you get the first signs of recession,
20:29price rises, social unrest
20:31and even disturbing patterns in the weather.
20:35But even in the early 1800s,
20:37disturbing patterns in the weather.
20:40But even in their worst imaginings,
20:42they couldn't have foreseen what lay ahead.
20:51From the 1290s, the English summer went wrong.
20:56And in a credulous age, omens and prophecies started to stack up.
21:021302.
21:05It is foretold that great misfortunes lie ahead.
21:09Earthquakes and wars.
21:12Division of realms and peoples.
21:15And a great and unheard of famine.
21:24As climate change set in, the village braced itself.
21:35The key person at village level was the reeve.
21:39The reeve's job was to supervise the agricultural year in the village.
21:44The ploughing and the reaping and the sowing.
21:46He chaired the village court, adjudicated on disputes
21:50and he submitted the accounts to the landlords,
21:53the fellows of Merton College.
21:56And the reeve in 1314 was a man called John Polly.
22:00He was married with four kids, Agnes, Hugh, Will and Rob.
22:04He wasn't a rich man, his father only held seven and a half acres,
22:08but he was a free man, not a villain.
22:11And it's in John's accounts that the first signs can be seen
22:15of the coming catastrophe.
22:20In the Kibworth court rolls, and in many others across England,
22:23we can watch as disaster strikes.
22:291314. January.
22:32A severe cold. One frost lasted more than two weeks.
22:38Extra milk was needed for the lambs and oats for the horses.
22:42Spring. April, very cold.
22:45A high mortality of doves.
22:49Summer was cold, with continual rain.
22:53The roses were late this year.
22:56Autumn, very wet, followed by a sharp frost.
23:00Ploughing was late, more oats were needed for the horses.
23:05Winter. Snow cover for much of the time.
23:10We fed the peas to the pigs.
23:141315. A late winter this year.
23:18It was wet and cold into the spring.
23:21Extra hoeing.
23:23The peas were flooded.
23:28Summer was very wet. Very low yields for barley and wheat.
23:32Autumn, very wet. Ploughing prolonged. Sheep rot.
23:381316. Late spring.
23:42The weather was wet. More sheep rot.
23:45Summer was exceptionally dry.
23:48Ground rock hard.
23:50We had to purchase 12 measures of steel
23:53and 40 pieces of iron for the repair of ploughs.
23:57Much more this year because of the dryness of the summer
24:01and the hardness of the fallow.
24:07By 1315, the people found themselves in the worst famine
24:11in British and European history.
24:13The harvest of 1315 was a disaster.
24:16Poor tenants were forced to give up their holdings
24:19and sell off their gear.
24:21People were dying everywhere.
24:23Grain yields slumped and prices shot up.
24:27While rich merchants bought up the surplus to make a profit,
24:31the peasants were thrown back on their knowledge of the world.
24:36The harvest of 1315 was a disaster.
24:40While rich merchants bought up the surplus to make a profit,
24:44the peasants were thrown back on their knowledge of the countryside.
24:48Your main meal would have been your pottage or porray,
24:51whatever happened to be in season, even edible weeds.
24:54Things like fat hen and orange and bittercress.
24:58We know about the medieval cottage garden
25:01from a minute excavation done of one peasant house,
25:04the kind lived in by Matilda and Alice Starr.
25:08So the herbs would just go right up to your cottage front, then?
25:11Absolutely. You would cultivate as much as you possibly could, really.
25:15Starvation was always a possibility.
25:20And you would grow whatever you possibly could.
25:23And this is where your edible weeds came in.
25:27Mallows, hyssop, mugwort, the Artemisia vulgaris, the wild wormwood.
25:33If your crops failed, at least you'd have something to put in the pottage.
25:37If you were good at doing this, you could just about keep things together.
25:40If you were good, you may well be able to keep going.
25:44You learn what's around in your local area,
25:47so you know what's growing in your hedgerows,
25:49and you know from past experience what's good to pick and what isn't.
25:53Yeah, yeah.
25:55You've got beer in there, and of course you get lots of calories from that.
25:59You've got all these greens, herbs from the hedgerows.
26:04You've got things like alexanders and fivers, flat-leaf parsley.
26:09And depending what year we're in, we'll get changes of those as well.
26:12So they really knew how to exploit what was around them, then?
26:16I think so. I think so.
26:19And it's very much a community effort as well.
26:21It's not just the family. It's everybody living in that rural area.
26:25You know, with field strips, farming those strips, their animals.
26:29People are still living with their animals, too, because they're that precious.
26:32You've got to make sure they're going to get through the winter.
26:44The next year, 1316, things only got worse.
26:47Across England, hundreds of thousands were now dying.
26:54Northern Europe froze under a blanket of snow and ice.
26:59What they didn't know was that they were in the middle of a little ice age.
27:07And then came a new and disturbing development,
27:10the first signs of a virulent pestilence among animals,
27:14recorded by the Leicester chronicler Henry Knighton.
27:18In 1318 and 1319, there was a horrific mortality of humans,
27:25and a pestilence of animals throughout the Kingdom of England.
27:31Conditions were so bad that the surviving people didn't have the wherewithal
27:35to cultivate or sow their lands.
27:38Every day, they were burying as many as they could
27:41in improvised cemeteries everywhere.
27:43And so a great ruin seized the English people.
27:47There's a tiny detail from that time, at the manor house in Kibworth Beecham,
27:51where the absentee landlord had let things fall to rack and ruin.
27:55The jury say that the manor house itself is a total ruin
28:00and has been divided up into cottages,
28:03worth five shillings a year, it says.
28:06They note all these things, don't they, in the Middle Ages,
28:08and let out to farm.
28:10So it's a little, kind of, snobby little manor house.
28:14So it's a little, kind of, snapshot, isn't it,
28:16of that terrible winter coming on,
28:18when they lost all their harvest with the rain and that autumn...
28:21We've nearly had a winter like that up here now.
28:24Yes.
28:26It's been a horrible winter with a terrible lot of rain.
28:30Can you imagine what that must've been like in a community where...
28:33Yes, quite.
28:35Well, everybody in the village devoted their labour to making food, wasn't it?
28:38Yes, absolutely.
28:44Grain prices in Leicester Market during the famine
28:47had now shot up seven times, to 44 shillings a quarter,
28:51when you needed eight quarters to sow an acre.
28:56As the famine got worse, the Merton court books are full of little details.
29:00In the winter of 1314-15, Nick Sybil died,
29:04and the college took over the administration of his strips as his son was underage.
29:10Then, in 1315-16, the court book says,
29:14John Sybil, aged 14, inherited his father's lands,
29:18and he sowed them with seven pence worth of oats,
29:2218 pence worth of wheat, and four shillings worth of peas.
29:27He was the breadwinner now.
29:30So, with a widowed mother and younger siblings, young John was in trouble.
29:34Harvest 1316 was another disaster,
29:38and to make things worse, there were signs of sickness
29:40in his most precious possession, his plough oxen.
29:46Almost four million animals have been killed...
29:50Like the modern foot-and-mouth epidemic in Britain,
29:52the virus raged out of control,
29:55only this more virulent and more agonising.
29:59There was also an unheard-of mortality among the cattle,
30:02the oxen, the cows and the calves.
30:06It continued unabated for several years,
30:08and everywhere the poor cattle seemed to be crying out to the people,
30:13looking at them and roaring as if they were in tears
30:16because of the terrible pain that gnawed at their insides.
30:19And then, suddenly, they would fall down and die.
30:29The news of such terrible suffering in the countryside
30:32caused great consternation here in Merton.
30:36They saw immediately that it would be impossible
30:39to push the receipt of rents as it had been before the famine.
30:50The Great Famine was remembered with bitterness.
30:55The merchants still had profited.
30:59The supplies had been there,
31:02which, had a supine government been motivated to move them with more alacrity,
31:08could perhaps have staved off disaster.
31:11As the popular songs of the time said,
31:13there was one law for the rich and one for the poor,
31:18for might is right and the land is lawless.
31:26More than half a million people in England died in the Great Famine,
31:29up to 10% of the population.
31:34But peasant societies like medieval Kibbworth are resilient.
31:37For centuries, they'd lived with famine and disease.
31:42And in the 1320s, they began to recover.
31:46So much so that in 1327, the king raised a poll tax on all freeholders.
31:54And in the National Archive, the returns survived for Kibbworth.
32:00But what do they call it in 1327, David?
32:03Just K-Y-B-B-E-W-O-R-T-H, Kibberworth.
32:07Kibbworth.
32:08This is for the 20th of 1327,
32:11so it's a 20th of the value of everybody's chattels,
32:16which is basically your corn and your animals.
32:18You had to have corn and animals worth ten shillings,
32:22which is, in modern terms, half a pound.
32:24The minimum you'd actually pay for the tax, if you had ten shillings,
32:28would be six pence, so that's six of these pennies.
32:31Oh, yeah, let's have a look. Sure.
32:33Here is... Wait for it. Medieval money.
32:36Let's pour it all out. Oh, great.
32:37And these are all... These are silver pennies from the mid-13th century.
32:42Yeah. And this is the only currency.
32:44So everything had to be paid in silver pennies.
32:48Anything which is just pence, 18 pence, 18 pence, 14 pence, 12 pence,
32:54you're a peasant and you're...
32:57Whereas, I mean, the top person, William Swan, has got four and six.
33:04That's 54 pennies, as against 12 pennies here.
33:07And he would be a sort of major freeholder.
33:11So there are big class divisions and wealth divisions within Kibworth, then?
33:16Yeah, clearly here, even within what is a peasant society,
33:19there are big class divisions.
33:21I mean, the really poor people aren't there.
33:23So we don't know what the size of Kibworth was.
33:25If you had a whole list of the names of villagers, it might go on for ages,
33:29with people below the line needed for taxation.
33:34KIBWORTH, WESTERN KIBWORTH
33:51During this time, Leicester nearby began to draw many Kibworth people
33:56as craftsmen, drapers, ironmongers,
33:59joining guilds, bettering themselves.
34:02Leicester was growing.
34:06And, of course, it was growing because people were coming in,
34:09because they could make a better living.
34:15This is actually a tax roll.
34:17People who are identified by their trade or where they come from.
34:20You've got William of Kibworth,
34:22Geoffrey of Osburston or William of Lutterworth.
34:25They're local places, but also people from further afield.
34:28There's someone from Carlisle, I think I noticed earlier.
34:31But they're not all men, either.
34:33There's Alicia de Kibworth here.
34:35These are people who are living in Leicester,
34:38who are taxed in Leicester.
34:40Could even be guild members in Leicester, perhaps.
34:43But keeping their village name, but working in trades here.
34:48I suppose that's how they know.
34:50I'm talking about William. Which William?
34:52Well, the William from Kibworth, that William.
34:57There's only a limited number of Christian names.
35:00So you're beginning to see surnames coming in, aren't you?
35:04But cities can be dangerous places,
35:06especially for inexperienced country boys.
35:09From the time of the famine, there's a cautionary tale
35:12involving a man from Kibworth.
35:15Contencio Motar Erat.
35:18Yes. Punch-up.
35:20A punch-up?
35:21This is a fight between Ivo, cleric of Great Stretton,
35:26and Henry Pollings,
35:29who's described as...
35:32Groom of Alice of Stretton.
35:34That's right. But she's Alice of Stretton of Leicester.
35:37She's one of the newcomers who come to the city
35:39to keep the name of their village as well as...
35:41That's right.
35:43So a dispute broke out between Ivo the clerk,
35:47so he's a lettered person, this guy,
35:50and Henry Pollings, Alice Stretton's groom,
35:53in a place called Parchman Lane.
35:55Parchman Lane, yes.
35:56It was a little sort of lane that ran just inside the town walls.
36:03In November of around the hour of Vespers,
36:06sort of four, six o'clock evening, anyway,
36:09it would be dusk.
36:10Yeah, 25th of November.
36:12Yes, it'd be dark. Darkness coming on.
36:14Yes. Narrow lane.
36:15Yes, just the place to have your...
36:18Rumpus, isn't it, really?
36:20I don't know what they were doing.
36:22Now enters the good Samaritan,
36:25Philip Leung of Kibworth, son of one of Merton's free tenants,
36:29and he's about to pay a heavy price for being a have-a-go hero.
36:34It's almost like a citizen's arrest, isn't it?
36:36Yeah.
36:37Gets hold of this chap and...
36:39and takes him towards the house of the aforesaid Alice.
36:44Then...
36:45Venit quia Johannes Filius Alani,
36:50le mustard-maker.
36:52John, the son of Alan the mustard-maker.
36:54Notorious, I hope, mustard-makers.
36:57Yes, that's right. Yes.
36:58Great. Great.
37:00Out he comes.
37:01All roads lead to Alice's house.
37:03With a certain bow, and shot the aforesaid Philip
37:05with a certain small arrow in the head between the eye and the nose,
37:09right up to the brain.
37:11Very unpleasant.
37:12Yes. Philip lived until the following Monday,
37:16and then he died.
37:18The coroner's language is almost like today, isn't it?
37:21Did the aforesaid John, did the aforesaid,
37:23in a westerly direction, a sword worth five shillings.
37:27That's right. That's it.
37:29And before the bailiff, the inquiry was held,
37:33which said that no-one was suspected
37:36except the aforesaid John,
37:39who had fled the scene after the deed.
37:41That's right. That's right.
37:42And got away, presumably.
37:44And John, the son of Alan the mustard-maker,
37:46sounds a slightly nefarious character, do you think, Robin?
37:49Well, I...
37:51He's a wanted man now, yes. He's accused of an outlaw.
37:57As for Philip's family,
37:58they must have wished he'd stayed on the family's strips in the Eastfield,
38:02or that he'd come home early for Christmas.
38:22Now, in the 14th century, Christmas was the great holiday.
38:27You got three weeks off from work in the fields
38:30from mid-December to Plough Monday,
38:34after Twelfth Night.
38:43That was the time when the ploughmen and their boys
38:45carried the ploughshare around the houses of the village,
38:48with songs and dancing, and received cakes and ale.
38:53It's a tradition that survived till the 1930s in Kibworth.
38:56It was a festive time for medieval villagers,
39:00when work was put aside and neighbours got together.
39:11But at Christmas 1348,
39:13terrible rumours came to the village.
39:18They came down the road from London.
39:25Nearby in Leicester, Henry Knighton tells the tale.
39:32It started in India,
39:34and then it moved across the face of the earth from Tartary
39:37through the land of the Saracens and into the lands of the Christians,
39:42a universal plague upon mankind.
39:45On the 25th June 1348, it landed at Weymouth.
39:52Rats came from the ships from...
39:54And they came from Weymouth and spread the way north.
39:57And what caused it in particular? What was it about the rats, Andrew?
40:02The fleas on the rats had, like, a disease that was contagious.
40:06That's very good. How did it begin?
40:10Oil comes around.
40:12That's very good.
40:14It's the bubonic plague that we're particularly looking at,
40:17and the pneumonic plague as well.
40:23Ever since, the Black Death has seized the European imagination,
40:28the ultimate symbol of the powerlessness of humanity
40:31in the face of King Death.
40:41Oh, the plague only rises on the morning of the last day...
41:02In the winter of 1348, the plague reached London.
41:06London Barricades
41:11Just outside London Wall, close to the Barbican,
41:14tradition says that a huge death pit was opened here,
41:18under Charterhouse Square.
41:23Under the grass are said to be 10,000 burials.
41:37Recently in London,
41:39the first Black Death cemetery to be scientifically excavated
41:43has revealed close-up detail from 1348.
41:51The gravediggers, too scared to take coins from the purses of the dead.
41:58In Kibworth, they knew it was coming.
42:01A two-pronged attack up the Bristol Channel
42:04and through the rivers of East Anglia,
42:06like malevolent monsters, and at the point of their jaws, Kibworth.
42:17That Christmas, young Robert Church had gone down to Oxford
42:20to apply in person to the fellows of Merton for a holding in the village.
42:24Perhaps he brought the plague back.
42:29The first known death in the parish
42:31was in Kibworth Beecham early that spring.
42:36And then, in the Merton Court Roads,
42:39the full horror begins to unfold.
42:47That should be a fairly...
42:50Very striking.
42:55Written on both sides as well.
42:57Oh, yeah.
43:0022, 1348.
43:08So the college, even in the catastrophe of the Black Death,
43:11they tried to keep the administration running and...
43:16The rhythm of life just continues and it's a way of coping, I suppose.
43:20It's an incredibly human response in catastrophe, isn't it,
43:24to keep things ordered, I suppose.
43:30Right, I think we have... Yes, we have it.
43:33Post-conquest in 23.
43:3623rd year of the reign of King Edward.
43:39Edward III.
43:41So 1349.
43:43The year of the Black Death.
43:45And we know what time of year this was, do we?
43:48It should even give us a day.
43:5214th of May.
43:55These are the swearing-in of new officers and a beadle.
44:01The new Reeve.
44:03Yes, names that we recognise.
44:05Pole, William Pole.
44:07John Haynes.
44:09The administration was so immediate,
44:11there wasn't a bureaucracy that was, you know,
44:13delegated to a local authority, as we have today.
44:16You were the local authority.
44:19If you weren't elected this year, you could be elected next year
44:22to be the constable or, you know, looking after the pound or whatever.
44:31Meeting of the village court,
44:33Kibworth Harcourt, St George's Day, 1349.
44:41John Church, Reeve.
44:43The following tenants died of the pestilence.
44:47Emma Cook.
44:49Alice Arran.
44:51John Church Senior.
44:53Agnes Polly.
44:55Robert Polly.
44:57Mr Haynes.
44:59Mr Goodwin.
45:01John and Constance Sybil.
45:05Margaret Meister.
45:07Richard Sylvester.
45:09Nick Clark.
45:11Henry Harcourt and Matilda Harcourt.
45:15Bill Smith.
45:18Alice Carter.
45:20Adam Kibworth.
45:22Thomas Harcourt.
45:24Rob Meister.
45:26Nick Polly.
45:28Emma Wade.
45:30Agnes Allitt.
45:32John Hayne.
45:34Will Milner.
45:36And 1349 wasn't the end of it.
45:38King Death came again to the village in 1361,
45:4278, 89 and 95,
45:46and a last cruel spasm in 1412.
45:50The Polly family alone had seven male members dead.
45:56Modern equivalent is like the First World War
45:58with a whole generation signing up and going off together
46:01and not coming back.
46:06What have we got here?
46:08The black ink is replacements?
46:10Yes, and the brown writing has been crossed out
46:12and then sort of almost carried in is the new talent.
46:16Is that a... Is that a Polly up there as well?
46:20Can you... Can you see?
46:23In his notes in the court book,
46:25the Reeve keeps up the impression of normality.
46:28One of the customary talents is one of the women.
46:30Yes, this is Isabella Polly.
46:32Oh, yes.
46:34You can see her name has been crossed through.
46:36It's something completely different.
46:38Robert Smith, Roberta Smith has been...
46:41It's not a member of her family, unless by marriage,
46:44but it's a completely... It's an alien...
46:47It's not passed from mother to son.
46:50And the family couldn't take it over, presumably,
46:52because of their losses.
46:54Possibly weren't enough sons to take over.
46:57You dug out this sort of space here.
46:59It's about this area, isn't it?
47:01You can still see bones coming through there.
47:03There's lots of tiny, tiny little bones there.
47:05I found a few tiny bits of pottery popping out as well.
47:08Across Kibworth, many properties were abandoned at this time,
47:12but the evidence around the medieval marketplace
47:15for what happened after the Black Death was thin, to say the least.
47:20I think it's plastic.
47:23A bit disappointing in terms of medieval activity,
47:26but I think having the sort of negative evidence
47:29for the medieval period is good in itself as well.
47:32When you take this forward to the next period...
47:37Wow!
47:38Smeaton, which has been with us for so long,
47:41seems to be absolutely devastated by it.
47:44There's just two or three sites
47:47that have produced single sherds of pottery.
47:49That is so amazing.
47:52One area that carries on in occupation seems to be up here.
47:55And even if some of these other areas are occupied,
47:58what it's really showing is this huge dislocation
48:00where these test pits that were producing pottery
48:02for the high medieval period,
48:03those plots are not being occupied nearly as intensively.
48:06The people who lived there clearly are somewhere else.
48:08And you're talking, I suppose, about a population
48:11that's gone from maybe two million in 1086
48:13to something like six possibly in 1300.
48:16There's a lot of argument about this, isn't there?
48:18But a collapse...
48:19Perhaps collapses back down to two or three.
48:21Massive contraction.
48:31After the ravages of the plague,
48:33many English villages were deserted forever.
48:36But not here.
48:38Even Smeaton survived,
48:40with the old families we met in the 1270s,
48:43the Allens, the Swans.
48:48But in Harcourt,
48:50the Merton Court Rolls show the loss of two-thirds of the population.
48:56The highest losses from the Black Death known anywhere in Britain.
49:01And a hint of the villagers' reactions to the catastrophe
49:04comes in a box of documents which has recently turned up,
49:07recording grants made of property and land in the 1350s
49:11that later came into the hands of the village grammar school.
49:14They still provide a charitable income for Kibworth High School.
49:18It's an astonishing treasure trove, the school box.
49:21These are the earliest documents from the 1350s,
49:25the immediate aftermath of the Black Death.
49:28It's very rare that you can home in
49:31on what the ordinary people, the peasant farmers,
49:35are thinking at this time.
49:37But it's remarkable.
49:40It's a very, very rare document.
49:43The peasant farmers are thinking at this time.
49:47But it's revealed here.
49:51This is a little land document, like a mortgage.
49:54''Sciat presentes et futuri.''
49:57''Know, people now and people in the future,
50:00''that I, John Deere,
50:02''dediate concessi this grant of land,
50:07''confirmed with Robert Chapman of Kibworth.
50:12''It is of one house, unum messuagium,
50:16''which belonged to Nick Poley in Church Lane.''
50:20Poley died in the Black Death, recently dead.
50:24''Along with a rood,
50:26''that's a quarter of an acre in Middle Furlong,
50:28''and a rood of meadow.''
50:30What these men are doing is they're putting together
50:33a little parcel of property and land
50:36whose revenues, supervised by a group of local trustees, farmers,
50:41will give enough money to fund a chantery priest,
50:45separate from the parish church.
50:47Now, this priest may in time have even taught the kids in the village
50:51how to read and write,
50:53but his chief job is to do masses, dirges and requiems forever
50:59for the souls of the dead,
51:01for the mothers and fathers, the brothers and sisters
51:04and the children of the village who died in the Black Death.
51:08The greatest catastrophe in its history.
51:16That document from 1353 is the start of a whole series of gifts
51:20for commemoration and charity.
51:24In Kibworth, it's a continuous thread
51:26from the bequests of Tudor farmers in their wills
51:29to Victorian villagers who left trusts to provide for the poor.
51:34Our English ancestors believed that if a community is to thrive,
51:38it cannot leave the sick and the starving behind.
51:43In fact, they saw charity as one of the foundations of community.
51:49And you can still see it in action.
51:51This is Kibworth's 24-hour relay to raise money for cancer research.
51:59Of course, there's a huge gap between the 14th century and us.
52:04One, two, three!
52:10Sometimes it's hard to believe that we're the same people
52:15or that our medieval ancestors would recognise us as their descendants.
52:23But I think they still would.
52:27The spirit of Britain, partly crazy, very kind, very generous, very giving,
52:32really good.
52:34A good friend of ours, Gordon, we kind of did it for him
52:37and for everybody else that was in need, I suppose.
52:42So perhaps the values of the medieval world
52:45are not so far from us as we might think.
52:49They're still there, running just under the surface of our lives,
52:54keeping the connection with the generations of the past far and near.
53:00Everyone who enters, the teens, are given one of these bags and a candle.
53:08They decorate the candles and make a dedication
53:12to people who have either lost the fight or are still in the fight
53:18or they just love Napoli or have survived.
53:23There are lots of survivors, too.
53:30And we say no be a mirror in darkness.
53:34No we know of party, but then ye shall know as I am known.
53:40And no dwell in faith, hope and charity,
53:44but the most of these is charity.
54:00The Black Death
54:18But catastrophe also changes us.
54:21After the Black Death, deep social unrest led in 1381
54:26to mass revolt by peasants across England.
54:29But not in Kibworth.
54:32The later outbreaks of plague had brought village society almost to its knees.
54:37The early 15th century was one of the worst times in village history.
54:41But change was in the air and driven by the community itself.
54:47In the face of such economic hardship and distress,
54:51many people at the time saw that change must come
54:54in the relationship between the rulers and the ruled in England.
54:56But the change came in Kibworth not through violent revolution,
55:00but through negotiation.
55:02And in 1427, the college took the key step
55:06of abolishing all 18 customary tenancies.
55:10That's the land holdings which were held by vilains,
55:14semi-free peasants who owed work services to their lord.
55:17So from that moment, if you were an ordinary Kibworthian,
55:21you no longer held your land in bondagio, in bondage.
55:24But ad voluntatem, at will.
55:28In other words, negotiated with your landlord for a cash rent.
55:32And at the same time, the college reduced the rents right across the board.
55:37And then, finally, in 1439,
55:40a special court was held in Kibworth to cement this relationship.
55:45Kibworth, curia recognitionis,
55:50between the customary tenants of Kibworth
55:54and the scholars of Merton College, Oxford.
55:58It's a document to finalise and record
56:01the mutual consent of both parties to the New Deal.
56:05It draws a line under the feudal age
56:08which has ruled in England since 1066 and even before.
56:12Now, labour services and villainage are abolished.
56:17You can have your son or daughter inherit your land.
56:21You can take out a leasehold.
56:22You can transfer lands, build up your holdings, amalgamate your tenancies.
56:27You can decide whether you want to be an arable farmer
56:31or whether you want to breed stock.
56:33You can view English history at this time
56:36through the lives of kings or queens, if you like,
56:38through the Hundred Years' War and the Wars of the Roses.
56:42But here is a glimpse at grassroots level
56:46of changes that were no less significant in the national story.
56:49By the 1440s, the people of Kibworth,
56:53like many villagers throughout England,
56:56are on the way to becoming modern people.
57:03So that's the story of how the medieval villagers of Kibworth
57:07survived famine, pestilence and the Black Death.
57:15That's how the villagers got through England's age of famine
57:19and age of disaster and, in the end, came out stronger.
57:28600 years ago, Kibworth was already a deep-rooted community.
57:32The old families, the Poleys, the Astons, the Swans,
57:36had already lived and worked here for centuries.
57:39But this story is also about a living English community today.
57:44We've been raising funds for six months, and a tough six months.
57:47There's been a recession.
57:49Because history is not just something that happened back then, in the past.
57:54History, in the end, is now, and us.
57:58Really for life, Kibworth, 2010, rose...
58:03£65,737!
58:09And it continues.
58:11In the next chapter in the story of England,
58:13battle for conscience, the rise of the English home
58:17and the new world of Tudor England.
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