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00:00This is the story of one place through the whole of English history.
00:13Even little Kibworth had its Norman castle.
00:16It's a statement of intent, isn't it?
00:19This is what we've really come to see.
00:21To tell the tale, we'll be using medieval manuscripts,
00:24letters, diaries, photos and the latest science.
00:28That timber and all the other timbers in that range
00:31are probably felled in 1385.
00:34But our biggest help will come from the villagers themselves.
00:39This is Peter reading the texts of their ancestors,
00:42digging pits and doing surveys of their medieval fields.
00:45On the other side of the hedge.
00:47That's cheating. No, it wasn't.
00:49You should have done that earlier.
00:51And for once, this is not the tale of the rulers.
00:56Of course, you can always tell history
00:58through the stories of kings and queens,
01:00but it's only when you look at it through the lives of the ordinary people
01:04and see how our society has developed over time,
01:07how our rights and duties have evolved
01:09and how waves of newcomers have shaped and changed us
01:13that you begin to understand who we really are.
01:17SPEAKS GERMAN
01:23I go out at daybreak and drive the oxen.
01:27It's hard work because I'm not free.
01:301349. John Church, Reve.
01:34The following tenants died of the pestilence.
01:38Emma Cook, Alice Arran, John Church Senior,
01:42Agnes Polly, Robert Polly.
01:46I was born on March the 12th, 1783.
01:50I had no education, for instead of school, I was set to lace-making.
01:55I expect that you have heard that our regiment has been in a big fight.
01:59The enemy's trench taken at bayonet point.
02:02But Lance Corporal Fisher was killed.
02:04Did you know you've got a family member here?
02:06Yeah. So that's him. Yeah, must be.
02:46BELLS CHIMING
02:50BELLS CHIMING
03:12The history and antiquities of the county of Leicestershire.
03:17It was written in the 1780s and 90s.
03:22And here...
03:25..the first detailed account of Kibworth.
03:29In ancient writings called Kibord,
03:32it's situated on the great turnpike road from London,
03:36nine miles distant from Leicester,
03:38and five from Harborough, the nearest market town.
03:42It consists of three hamlets,
03:44Kibworth Beecham, or Lower Kibworth,
03:48Kibworth Harcourt, Upper Kibworth,
03:51and Smeaton Westerby,
03:53now considered as one hamlet,
03:55although actually two distinct villages.
04:00And the church, dedicated to St Wilfred,
04:04pleasantly situated on a considerable eminence
04:07amid a group of trees.
04:12Now, if that makes Kibworth sound like a bit of an idyll,
04:17of course it's not.
04:24It's a real place in today's Britain,
04:27the kind of place most of us live in now.
04:34It's got housing estates, Chinese and Indian takeaways,
04:38and traffic.
04:42But like every place, it carries the marks of history.
04:47This was the main London road in the 18th century,
04:51and the fancy pizzeria, the Boboli, was one of the coaching inns.
04:55There were seven or eight of them just along this street here.
04:58Bricked-up coaching entrance there.
05:00They sold more than food and drink, too, some of them.
05:06It's the same anywhere in England.
05:08In England, you only have to look and the stories leap out.
05:14That's my Aunt Annie.
05:17And with a little help, you can begin to piece together the picture.
05:21There's been a telephone exchange here at some time.
05:24You can watch the great events of the nation through local eyes...
05:29..and see how our ancestors really lived.
05:32There's no way that William Herrick is going to be looking after his house.
05:36It's what you people are for.
05:39And whether you're reading the village newspaper from the Second World War...
05:43Christmas greetings, happy family reunions,
05:46good luck and success in Civvy Street.
05:48..or the treasure trove of medieval manuscripts in the school box...
05:52The first two boxes, the early stuff, is here.
05:56And the really oldest material, going back to the 1350s...
06:00..our ancestors will always surprise us.
06:03We're not just talking about one literate man every 20 miles.
06:08They're all over the place.
06:10And they're writing and they're writing and they're writing.
06:15But why choose Kibworth?
06:19Kibworth is right in the centre of the country.
06:22And from the 1200s, it's got the most wonderful set of documents
06:26that enable you to tell the story of ordinary people's lives.
06:30But it doesn't stop then.
06:32The Industrial Revolution has got canals and railways
06:35and framework knitting and factories.
06:39In other words, in this one place,
06:42you can tell the whole story of the nation.
06:49The search began one summer Saturday morning.
06:53In answer to our advert on local radio,
06:56250 villagers gathered at the village hall
06:59to help us search for their past.
07:03This piece?
07:07First, they were going to dig
07:09more than 50 archaeological test pits across the village.
07:14And they had to do it professionally, supervised by the experts.
07:23I think this is going to be a brilliant weekend.
07:25It's fantastic to see so many people here.
07:27The record booklet is effectively this thing here.
07:31It's a pro-forma recording system.
07:34You'll be digging your test pit, which is a metre square,
07:37in a series of 10cm slices.
07:41Each of those 10cm slices we call the contents.
07:45Good luck. Have fun.
07:50Now, like most places in England,
07:52Kibworth is only recorded for the first time in 1086 in Doomsday Book.
07:57Before then, its history is a blank.
07:59So what could archaeology tell us about its beginnings?
08:03That was our first task.
08:05This is part of the old medieval village of Harcourt here.
08:12These whole three villages at the moment is complete darkness, really,
08:15in terms of what we know about physically what's there,
08:17archaeologically what's there, what really was going on.
08:19If we can do 50 test pits, that just throws the lights on.
08:22It's knockout, isn't it?
08:23And we've got phenomenal documents for this bit.
08:25Not bad for that.
08:30The Home Guard used to practice here,
08:32and there were some unspent bullets just around this area.
08:36You know, I'm hoping to find something good.
08:42Tape measure, just there, darling.
08:46Yes, I suspect it might have been bigger originally.
08:49Oh, you're doing a great job. Hi, everybody.
08:52That's for the clay pipe, for example.
08:55So that's, again, this is sort of ordinary Victorian,
08:58early 20th-century household.
09:00That sort of precursors to cigarette.
09:02We found, like, shoe heels and belt buckles and stuff.
09:09We keep on finding rocks.
09:12We found some pieces of a pot.
09:14Apparently that's the tibia from a sheep.
09:18At the start, our clues were just broken bits of pottery,
09:22but it's amazing what an expert can get out of them.
09:25What we've actually got is pretty much every major pottery type
09:28going back to about 1450.
09:30Fantastic.
09:32Earliest bit we've got is that, which is midland purple,
09:34so that's about 400-1450.
09:36It could be as early as 1350.
09:38It's one of those pottery types we haven't quite got nailed down,
09:40but it's certainly post-Black Death, yeah.
09:42This place has been occupied since certainly 1400, I'd say,
09:45and maybe even 1350, because you've got this,
09:47which dates to about 1470, 1500.
09:51That, which is about 1580-1600.
09:55That's about 1680-1700.
09:58That's 1720-1750.
10:00And then you've got the 19th-century stuff as well.
10:02So, bang, full run of pottery through, and you've got that.
10:05It's unbelievable.
10:07So you've got, say, five, six, 650-year run of pottery in these trays.
10:12And then one piece got us all excited.
10:14That is looking good.
10:16Very nice. Let me just dry it off.
10:18That's what I think that is.
10:21It's a piece of really, really beaten-up Samian ware.
10:24First, second century.
10:26But that's Roman. I'm pretty sure that's Roman.
10:30By the afternoon, we'd got more Roman.
10:33Fantastic.
10:34Yes, OK.
10:38Ooh, let me come round.
10:40We found some teeth, three teeth in the other layers.
10:43Yeah?
10:44And some Roman pottery.
10:46Yeah, Roman pottery, two pieces.
10:48Roman? Wow.
10:50So did you dig those up yourself?
10:53Yeah.
10:55So, has it been fun?
10:56Yeah, it's been amazing. It's been really fab.
10:58I've never seen these two concentrate so much in our lives.
11:02Wow.
11:04Oh, gosh, it's all beautifully bagged.
11:11Yeah, that is great, isn't it? Fourth century, maybe.
11:19So it was only the first day,
11:21and we already had Roman, Iron Age, Beaker people
11:25and prehistoric flints.
11:28Big bones.
11:32So how's it been, Richard?
11:33I've kind of lost the will to live, to be honest with you.
11:38Yeah, that's natural clay, that, with iron pan in it.
11:41You'll be delighted to know you can stop.
11:44But, of course, serious archaeologists
11:47just put the kettle on.
11:57Back in the coach and horses that first day,
12:00we already knew that people had lived in the village
12:03for thousands of years.
12:07Absolutely fantastic.
12:09The more you know the village, the more you find out about the village,
12:12the more intriguing it gets.
12:14You don't realise the heritage that a village like Harcourt or Beecham has.
12:19I had no interest in any of this before you all came,
12:22so it's been really a revelation, hasn't it, I think, to all of us.
12:25The bit I liked was the little bit of flint we had, the little chipping.
12:29I just imagined the Little Stone Age man sitting on top of our hill
12:33just chipping away and looking at, say, a similar view.
12:36But a village is more than bricks and pot sherds.
12:39It's a living community.
12:41And we know from Doomsday Book
12:43that Kibworth was already a community in 1086.
12:47So how did that happen?
12:49How far back does Kibworth really go?
12:53Was it a village under the Romans?
12:57After all, Leicester nearby was an important Roman city.
13:01To try to find out more, I went back to the first archaeologists.
13:05Back in the 1700s, there were discoveries made in Kibworth,
13:09a horde of Roman coins and even a Roman inscription lost long ago.
13:15And just have a look at this.
13:17Here's the Ordnance Survey map from the 1880s,
13:21which marks...actually marks one of these sites.
13:25Here's Kibworth Harcourt.
13:27And in the 1810s and then in the 1850s,
13:32on this mound in the middle of the village behind the allotments,
13:36the munt, fragments of Roman pottery were discovered.
13:39And you see they're actually marked by the Ordnance Survey here.
13:43And they also, at the same time,
13:46dug a derelict medieval quarry,
13:49which is the one you see here,
13:51and they also, at the same time,
13:53dug a derelict medieval windmill mound on the edge of the village
13:58and found more Roman pottery.
14:01And close by there, in the late 1960s,
14:05a coin of the Emperor Constantine was discovered from the 330s,
14:10along with fragments of Roman roof tiles.
14:13So had there been some large Roman building in that area,
14:18if we're going to search for a Roman predecessor to Kibworth,
14:22then my guess would be...
14:25..that's where you should look.
14:37And who better to help us than the local experts?
14:41A group from the neighbouring village of Hallerton
14:44who are specialists in detecting what lies beneath the soil.
14:48This is a magnetometer.
14:50What it specialises in doing is detecting changes
14:54in the Earth's magnetism
14:56caused by the presence of buried archaeological remains.
15:03Where this particular technique is at its best really
15:06is in identifying things like the presence of ditches and gullies,
15:09pits, wells.
15:12But more often than not, it's the individual plots
15:15within which buildings may have been found.
15:19I'd brought with me an account from a local journal
15:23of finds made here in Victorian times.
15:301863, large bell-shaped barrow surrounded by a ditch
15:34north-west of the village, east of the road,
15:37opened early in the last century, which is, you know, early 1800s.
15:42And again in 1863, fragments of bone, Samian pottery,
15:46a layer of black soil, ashes, pieces of burnt wood,
15:49pieces of Roman pottery, and a pavement.
15:52So there is a Roman villa or building site somewhere here, isn't there?
15:56Yep.
15:58All sorts of clues.
16:02Ooh.
16:04That's pretty good. Let's process this a little bit more.
16:10Yes, we can.
16:12Oh, that's fabulous.
16:14Well, it looks fabulous.
16:16Here's our 60-metre wide, 200-metre long strip,
16:19and there in the top left-hand corner is the mill mound.
16:22Fantastic.
16:24And coming down at the bottom part,
16:26a whole series of rectangular enclosures,
16:28classic ditches that we see on a Roman farm or a Roman villa.
16:32Well, this afternoon we clearly need to do another strip
16:35about 20 metres wide down this end
16:37so that we can get the rest of the mill mound
16:39and the south-western corner of our Roman settlement,
16:42and then we're going to extend as far across this field to the north
16:45to get the rest of the settlement and see what else we can find.
16:49We did this field,
16:51picked up about 13, 14 bits of Iron Age pottery,
16:55which is quite a lot,
16:57and there were these rib bones,
16:59which were definitely human at the time.
17:01Wow.
17:03They turned out to be pig bones later on.
17:07But those pig bones led the Hallerton group
17:10to the greatest Iron Age treasure ever found in Britain.
17:15In 2000, they unearthed bowls, bracelets, ingots,
17:20and thousands of coins.
17:22The Hallerton treasure,
17:24which was buried near Kibweth
17:26at a shrine of the ancient British people who lived in this area,
17:29the Corrieltavi.
17:32The coins even named some of their kings,
17:35Vepo and Volisios and Domno Coveros,
17:39who ruled here on the eve of the Roman conquest in the 1st century.
17:51Over the next few days, fitted in at weekends or after work,
17:55the Hallerton group mapped the whole villa.
18:02It turned out to have been laid out
18:04over a settlement of circular huts of the ancient Britons,
18:07just long after the Roman conquest.
18:15You could never have imagined in your wildest dreams
18:18that here in this field we'd turn up a huge Roman villa
18:22with all its ancillary buildings and courtyards
18:25and evidence of life back in the Iron Age and the Bronze Age.
18:29It's a whole new beginning to the story of Kibweth.
18:38So there had been a community here even before the Romans,
18:42which had continued under Roman rule.
18:53The finds at the villa now focused our attention
18:56on the mysterious mound in the middle of the village,
18:59which had been used by the Romans
19:01as a place of worship for the ancient Romans.
19:07Known locally as the Munt.
19:11There are old stories that it was a Roman burial mound,
19:14and now we know there was a Roman villa nearby.
19:17Could that be true?
19:22Could it even be the tomb of one of those kings of the Coriol Tavi,
19:26who became a local landowner under the Romans?
19:30There's lots of local legends about the Munt.
19:33Some people say it was from the time of the ancient Britons
19:36or the Vikings, or that it was a Norman castle mound.
19:40But in the 1860s, there was an excavation here.
19:44They dug a trench into the mound,
19:46and nine feet down found the remains of a burial chamber,
19:50stone-lined with bone and ash,
19:53and an iron lampstand, and a small chapel.
19:57Stone-lined with bone and ash, and an iron lampstand,
20:01and fragments of pottery, Roman pottery.
20:06So Kibworth was a Roman settlement.
20:09And maybe the Munt was the tomb of a British chief
20:12living there under Roman rule.
20:14We'd found Roman pottery through Harcourt and Beecham,
20:17down to Smeet and Westerby.
20:22And it's easy to see why the Romans chose to live here.
20:27It's a beautiful little enclave.
20:30When you walk along the main street of Kibworth Beach,
20:33you'd never suspect that this lies here.
20:35Because a lot of people don't know it's here.
20:37There was good soil and, above all, good water.
20:42I think there's about 20 wells just in the Harcourt.
20:46Well, there are down here, quite a number down this road too.
20:49Where the double gates are, there's a well there.
20:52That holds a lot of water, I understand.
20:55It used to work... It would work again if I had it primed,
20:58but I haven't had it primed for several years now.
21:01When I was a little girl, they used to pump up twice a day,
21:04the two chaps that work here.
21:06Huckleberry and Grewcock were their names.
21:14So that's why the Romans liked it here.
21:18How lucky you are, you Britons, wrote one Roman poet.
21:23More blessed than any other land.
21:26Endowed by nature with every benefit of soil and climate,
21:30your winters are not too cold, your summers are not too hot.
21:36And to make life even more pleasant...
21:39Your days are long and your nights are short.
21:43So while it was Italian, the sun may appear to go down.
21:47In Britain, it just seemed to go past.
21:53Lino opened Kibworth's first Italian restaurant,
21:56at least since the fourth century.
22:01We took it on three years ago and sort of Italianised it.
22:05Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Bobberley Gardens.
22:08The Bobberley Gardens. Indeed. In Kibworth, not Florence.
22:12It's great, with the munt behind you.
22:35But civilisations decline and fall.
22:39Around 400 AD, the Roman Empire went into decline.
22:44There were many reasons.
22:46Costly foreign wars, food crises, greedy bankers, climate change.
22:52Sounds familiar?
22:54In 410, the Romans pulled their garrisons out of Britain.
22:59And soon, all the achievements of Roman civilisation had gone.
23:09It must have seemed scarcely believable,
23:12all these great achievements of Roman civilisation,
23:16the theatres, the civic buildings, the bathhouse,
23:20all of them falling into ruin.
23:24So Britannia went back to basics.
23:30In history, it's always surprising
23:32how swiftly the veneer of civilisation can be lost,
23:37how knowledge is forgotten.
23:41Maybe this is what we call a modern civilisation.
23:45A civilisation that has been forgotten for centuries.
23:48Our knowledge is forgotten.
23:52Maybe this is what will happen when the petrol runs out.
23:57The elites go, and with them, the know-how.
24:01In technology, we won't match the Romans again until the 18th century.
24:11So the villas are abandoned, murals crumble,
24:16mosaics break up,
24:19and with them, a whole view of the world.
24:27The original people, of course, remain.
24:30They're still the basis of our DNA today.
24:34But now we start to hear of newcomers, economic migrants,
24:38more and more of them inviting their countrymen and women
24:41from across the North Sea, in Germany and Denmark.
24:44And they are the Anglo-Saxons.
24:50This is one of the routes those early Anglo-Saxon migrants
24:53took into the heart of England.
24:56And it's an Anglo-Saxon landscape.
24:58There's an Anglo-Saxon cemetery up on that hill above us.
25:04It's called Knaves Hill, from the Anglo-Saxon word knaffa,
25:08meaning young man or a young warrior.
25:11And even better is this little stream here,
25:14which flows down from the Kibweth area into the River Welland.
25:18It's called the Langton Cordle today,
25:21the Cold Well or the Cold Spring.
25:24But it's got an older name.
25:26It used to be called the Lipping.
25:29And over in Schleswig, on the German-Danish border,
25:33there's still a river called the Lipping,
25:36in the region called Angeln,
25:38the very place where the Angles, the early English, came from.
25:42Isn't that wonderful?
25:48What you guys need to do, you just need to get it broken up,
25:51sort it through as quickly as possible.
25:55And back in the big dig in Kibweth,
25:57amazingly, the regulars at the coach and horses
26:00found their traces underneath the car park.
26:05Unless I'm very much mistaken...
26:07I don't think I am. That's a bit of early Saxon pottery.
26:10Now, we're talking 5th, 6th century, 7th, maybe, something like that.
26:14So it's the first bit of pagan period Saxon I've seen
26:18from the entire dig, all the test bits.
26:27It's a piece of an Anglo-Saxon bone cone.
26:30Around 500, maybe.
26:32A little bit earlier, a little later, but that's certainly pre-700.
26:36From the coach and horses car park. Who would have believed it?
26:40The most incredible thing, it's amazing how such a tiny piece
26:44can be so evocative in terms of, well, our imaginings
26:47about the early people of Kibweth.
26:50Anglo-Saxon cone from maybe around the year 500.
26:56The newcomers were a minority.
26:58Around them, most people still spoke Welsh.
27:01In fact, we can only trace the new migrants by their grave goods.
27:07Their burial urns.
27:09Their bone combs, like the one we found.
27:13But one of them was buried close to Kibweth.
27:17We know that she was in her very early 20s at latest
27:21because of the way that the bones are fused.
27:24You know, there's one last bone in your big toe that fuses
27:27when you're about 21 or 22, and that hadn't happened.
27:30Everything else had fused on.
27:32So we know pretty precisely how old she was.
27:34Well built, about five foot six tall.
27:37What part of society do you think she came from?
27:40She came from the top of society.
27:42I mean, she was found, you know, 1866,
27:46but we haven't found a better furnished grave.
27:49And not only are they a lot of things with her,
27:53but they are exotic things.
27:55Got the glass beaker at the top there.
27:57That's probably come from the Rhineland.
28:00The early Saxons had similar sort of beliefs to the Vikings.
28:03They believed in the feasting halls of the gods
28:05that you went to after you died.
28:07And like all well-brought-up people, she takes a bottle with her
28:10when she's going to a party,
28:12particularly one that's going to last for eternity.
28:14And tell us about the jewellery.
28:16These very perfectly preserved pieces, aren't they?
28:19They look as if they were made yesterday.
28:21These are essentially glorified safety pins.
28:24They hold her dress together, one of them on each shoulder.
28:27She was wearing a tube dress,
28:29so just basically a tube of cloth that's held up here on the shoulders
28:34with these two big safety pins.
28:36And then on the back of one of these brooches,
28:38there is a woolen thread tied around the spring,
28:42which almost certainly is the cord for this swag of beads
28:48that went round here from brooch to brooch.
28:51That's the way that Anglo-Saxons wore their beads,
28:53not round the neck, but from brooch to brooch.
28:56We saw all of them.
28:58None of them were hidden round the back.
29:00And, of course, at the centre of that is a bear claw.
29:04These are lucky charms, which ward off the evil eye.
29:07And here, very interesting,
29:10these little pieces, lined and notched patterns.
29:13Yeah, they're stylised keys.
29:15Roman women wore actual keys on their belt
29:18to show that they were in charge of the household.
29:20Anglo-Saxon women, although sometimes you find functional keys,
29:23stylised ones, seem to give the same message
29:26without actually opening a door.
29:28So it suggests that she was, even though she was relatively young,
29:31was in charge of a household.
29:37She was probably first or second generation Anglo-Saxon settler.
29:42Whether she is an Anglo-Saxon ethnically is another story entirely.
29:46All of those sites that had Romans on them
29:48at the end of the Roman period
29:50have Anglo-Saxon pottery on them
29:52in 500 or whenever that pottery is coming in.
29:55And my guess is that they are the very same people
29:58who, in some cases, whose family were there as Iron Age people
30:02before the Romans got there,
30:04have gone all the way through and then re-emerge as Anglo-Saxons
30:08when that is the way that the wind is blowing.
30:14One straw in the wind, and it is only a tiny little straw,
30:18is this Roman bead.
30:20I like to think maybe that was her grandmother's favourite bead
30:23that she wears.
30:25All these Anglo-Saxon beads, one Roman one,
30:27just to maybe think about that side of her family.
30:36These first Anglo-Saxons were pagans,
30:39barbarians as the Romans saw them.
30:42Scratching their runes, weaving their spells,
30:46they worshipped the gods of storm and forest,
30:49Woden and Thunor, at the Holy Oak, near Kipworth.
30:55But then, towards 600, back in Rome,
30:58Pope Gregory sent Christian missionaries
31:00to bring the lost province of Britain
31:02back into the fold of civilisation.
31:07Just as the heartland of Christianity was about to fall to Arab armies
31:11bearing the new faith of Islam,
31:13Roman missionaries went west
31:15to seek new converts for Christ among the northern barbarians.
31:27One day, the Pope was walking through a slave market in Rome
31:30and he saw a group of slaves who were fair-skinned,
31:34blonde-haired and blue-eyed, and he asked who they were,
31:37and the answer was Anglisunt, their Angles, English.
31:42The Pope, though, was so taken by their appearance
31:45that he answered,
31:47"'Known Anglisunt' said,
31:49"'Angeli, they're not Angles, they're angels.'"
31:52The English loved this story.
31:54It almost made them into a kind of chosen people.
31:57The Gens Anglorum, the race of the Angles, the English people.
32:02And ever since, although it was the Saxons
32:05who created the Kingdom of England,
32:08we weren't Saxonish, we were English.
32:13MUSIC PLAYS
32:23So, in the 7th and 8th centuries,
32:25the people of Kibworth became part of the Christian Kingdom of Mercia.
32:30This is a completely unknown period in the village story,
32:34but in the big dig, we found one tantalising clue.
32:42OK, so test pit 41 you've got here.
32:45This is... This is Smeaton.
32:47Yeah, this is really quite sensational.
32:50You're joking, I've got so much of this sensation already today.
32:54It's a nice assortment of sort of, I suppose,
32:57late 11th into early 12th century,
32:59but we've got one bit of earlier pottery mixed in with it.
33:02This rather grotty and quite dull-looking grey shirt
33:06is the missing piece of the jigsaw.
33:10It dates to between about 720 and 850.
33:13Well, that's very interesting.
33:15I don't think we've got any of that so far.
33:17You haven't, and neither has anybody else in Leicestershire.
33:20It's the first site anywhere in Leicestershire
33:23that's produced this particular type of pottery.
33:25If you take Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire together,
33:28there's only three sites that have ever produced it.
33:30It's usually a sign of either high status or two major routeways meeting.
33:34And this stuff travels a long way,
33:36but I've never seen any from Leicestershire before.
33:38It wasn't so much the pots themselves that were being traded,
33:40it was mainly their contents.
33:41Probably salt. It seems to have been tied in with the salt trade.
33:44Oh, really?
33:45So salt to the king's table in this?
33:47Quite possibly, yeah.
33:48Now, the date, you're saying, is between the 720s and 850s?
33:52About that, yeah.
33:53So this is right the moment when the famous kings of Mercia,
33:56like Offa, who built his dyke and Ethelball,
33:59they are staying in royal residences all around Kibberworth,
34:02aren't they, in Gumley and Glen and these places?
34:05That's exactly the sort of thing you'd expect to find
34:08at a royal centre in this part of the world.
34:10It makes you want to know more about Kibber,
34:14whoever he, or was it a she, was,
34:16the person who gave their name to this place.
34:25Like all English villages, Kibberworth carries its history in its name.
34:30Harcourt and Beecham, for example,
34:32come from the Norman lords after 1066,
34:35but the name Kibberworth itself is much older.
34:41So when did Kibberworth become Kibberworth?
34:44Well, as with most English towns and villages,
34:47the clues lie in the place name and in the landscape.
34:51In the later Middle Ages,
34:52Kibberworth was surrounded by a defensive ditch and hedge
34:56to keep out outlaws and bandits at night.
34:59The name Kibberworth means Kibber's Worth,
35:02the ditched enclosure of a man called Kibber.
35:06And place names like that start in the 730s in English documents,
35:10around the time of Paul's pottery.
35:12And the name Kibber sounds suspiciously like the names
35:16you find in the Mercian royal family,
35:19Pibber, Knebber and Tibber.
35:22My guess would be, and it is just a guess,
35:24that Kibber was a minor Mercian royal
35:27and he received this very nice piece of real estate
35:30from one of the Mercian kings, Zoffer or Affelbald,
35:34surrounded it with a ditch, and it's borne his name ever since.
35:47And what was life like for our 8th-century ancestors?
35:51Don't imagine a typical English village
35:53with a winding lane and thatched cottages.
35:56Kibberworth was a scatter of peasant houses.
36:01An Anglo-Saxon village from this time
36:03has been excavated at Stowe in East Anglia
36:06and rebuilt on its footings.
36:12Here, you can imagine the lives of our villagers.
36:20And it was a subsistence life,
36:22of a kind you can still see today in many poor parts of the world.
36:28I've stayed in villages like this in Amazonia and Peru,
36:32the Hindu Kush, Africa over the years.
36:35This is just the same.
36:37This is the way that ordinary people, peasant people,
36:39have lived their lives through most of human history.
36:42And it's the way our English ancestors lived
36:44for much of our history too.
36:47Those modern ideas about privacy and possessions,
36:50you know, bedrooms, your own room, stuff like that,
36:53that didn't even begin to come in until Elizabethan times
36:56and for most of us a lot later than that.
36:59Maybe that's why all this gives you that little shiver of recognition.
37:10It's so hard for us to imagine, isn't it?
37:12We have so much leisure time today in our multi-channel world
37:16with its short attention span.
37:19I must say, it's like watching people do a kind of zen meditation here.
37:24It's really interesting, isn't it?
37:26It's very relaxing.
37:30But for them, every key task took time.
37:36Well, I'm spinning straight from the unwashed fleece,
37:39straight from the sheep.
37:41I take a piece of fleece, which I tease out...
37:46..take it in my left hand, slightly scrunched up.
37:51Tease a small bit round.
37:53And the very fact it's still got all the oils in
37:56helps to make it stick.
37:58And as you twist the drop weight...
38:02..the twist runs up the...
38:06..runs up the wool and then joins together like magic.
38:16You thread the wools through the wooden tablets, or they might be horn.
38:20Put the colour in according to how you want the pattern.
38:23Stretch it on a frame
38:25and then you turn the whole block of tablets in one direction.
38:32And you get quite a nice, satisfying function as it comes round.
38:36And it brings up a different set of threads to the top.
38:40Weaving was an English art.
38:43The great ruler in Europe, Charlemagne, wrote to offer the King of Mercia
38:47asking for fine English cloth made in places like Kibworth.
38:54Bread was the staple, basically,
38:56and that was what you filled yourself up on.
38:59Anything you can catch, birds, fish, that sort of thing,
39:02the deer, if you could hunt deer.
39:04And then in November, of course, you got the blood month,
39:07when you kill all your livestock for the winter,
39:09and that you would have eaten a lot of meat.
39:13MUSIC
39:25By the 8th century, Welsh was dying out in Midland England,
39:29replaced everywhere by Old English,
39:32which we still speak today, give or take a few foreign borrowings.
39:37Even now, our key words for relationships and emotions are theirs.
39:41Father, mother, brother, sister, love, hate, life, death.
39:48I suppose the language is the most important single thing.
39:52Yeah, it's the single key that unlocks the whole mindset, isn't it?
39:56And we carry it with us today, of course.
40:00One small step for man, one great leap for mankind.
40:04These are all Anglo-Saxon words.
40:07You would think that all this stuff would have been excluded long ago
40:11and we would have moved on to far grander terms,
40:14but no, the Anglo-Saxon stuff, the English stuff is still here.
40:18It's very, very rare to find the ordinary people speaking, isn't it?
40:22Very much so.
40:24But there is this wonderful dialogue from around the year 1000,
40:28which is an interview with an Anglo-Saxon ploughman.
40:31Indeed, yes.
40:33And it begins...
40:38Earthling! That's the kind of thing I'd kind of had from Star Trek.
40:41Earthling.
40:43Earthling is a person who deals with the earth.
40:46The person who deals with the earth. Fabulous.
40:53How do you go about your work? Tell us about your work.
40:56So what does he say?
41:03Oh, Lord, how hard I must work.
41:34HE SPEAKS ANGLO-SAXON
41:53Mikkel, your dearth, he said.
41:56Sounds like a big job, tough work to me.
41:59Sounds like hard work to me.
42:01Absolutely. Yeah, a great deal of work.
42:03And he says...
42:07It is a great deal of work.
42:09HE SPEAKS ANGLO-SAXON
42:11Because I am not free.
42:13I am not free.
42:32It's been a bit hard digging, then, has it?
42:34Yes.
42:36In the late 9th century came the next big change in the village story.
42:41The Vikings.
42:43Now, in the big dig, no-one expected to find the Vikings,
42:47although we did find pottery from their time in Smeaton, Westerby,
42:51the last bit of whose name is Viking.
42:54Ah, the Buddha of archaeology is seated there in contemplation.
42:59Gosh, so what have we got?
43:01Well, most of this stuff is Victorian.
43:04It's all 19th century.
43:06We've got this background scatter of late 17th and 18th century
43:09till I came across that.
43:11Now, that's a bit of Stamford work.
43:19This is BBC Radio Leicester.
43:21But the key clues came from the surnames of some of today's villagers
43:25and from their DNA.
43:27If you are an eyelid, you may well be a Viking.
43:31Will you text me? Because there's a DNA test going on.
43:35I'm there, that's my father.
43:37Then goes right back to Charles Henry, who's known as Harry.
43:40Then George Thomas.
43:42George Thomas is my great-grandfather.
43:44His father is John.
43:46Then we go back to William, Richard and John Eyliffe,
43:51who apparently originated from Fleckney.
43:54Terry Eyliffe's surname appears around Kibworth from the 1300s.
43:59It's from a Viking name, Eyolfur.
44:03My great-great-grandfather's niece gave it to me before she passed away.
44:08So this is a valuation list, value of properties, houses...
44:13Wayne Coleman's family have been in Kibworth at least since Tudor times,
44:17and his name could be Viking, too.
44:20And here, Coleman, John Henry Coleman.
44:24I'll go back to 1692, the connections in the village.
44:28But Wayne's connection with the area could be much further back than he thinks.
44:34I've just looked at these markers known as YSTR markers,
44:37and essentially that stands for short-term repeat.
44:39So it'll put you into a broad group of Y chromosome type,
44:43and yours seems to fall into a broad group known as R1A.
44:46Now that's actually found across all of the north of Europe,
44:50so I'd need to do further typing to find out
44:52sort of where your Y chromosome type seems to be found.
44:55But when we see that type in England, we start to think Norway,
44:59we start to think Norse, because it's a type of Y chromosome type
45:02that's found at high frequency in Norway.
45:04We know that these Y chromosome types arrived in this country
45:07through the invasion of the Norse Vikings.
45:10You can get a hat now.
45:13Viking.
45:18I'm amazed.
45:20I'm amazed.
45:25And the story of how Wayne's and Terry's ancestors came to Kibworth
45:29starts with a sensational archaeological dig made 30 years ago,
45:33not far north of Kibworth, at Repton in Derbyshire.
45:40So a great view from up here of the landscape of Repton.
45:45This is going to be the site of Trench 8,
45:47and we're in the vicarage garden by the invitation, indeed, of the vicar.
45:53The site is where the tree is here, which I planted.
45:57And there's still a faint mark in the grass along in front of...
46:00just where we're crossing now.
46:02There was also a trench all the way down the edge of the churchyard there.
46:08Under here, there was a two-chamber Saxon building,
46:12and the eastern chamber had been used as an ossuary.
46:17They found 250 male skeletons, many with wounds,
46:21and 50 Anglo-Saxon women camp followers,
46:24casualties from the Viking Great Army which had terrorised England.
46:30This is where the Viking Great Army,
46:33the Mikkel Herre, as the Anglo-Saxons called it,
46:36came in that winter of 873-4,
46:39and they built their camp on this spot,
46:42dug a huge defensive fortification
46:45anchored at both ends on the river
46:47with the church here in the middle of the defences.
46:53What Martin Biddle and his team had found
46:56was the ceremonial burial of a Viking leader,
46:59probably the famously cruel king,
47:02called, believe it or not, Ivor the Boneless.
47:06But then, in 877, according to the Anglo-Saxon chronicle,
47:11the Viking Great Army changed their tactics.
47:15They settled down, shed out the land and began to plough.
47:25England was partitioned by treaty.
47:28To the south, the English king, Alfred the Great,
47:31to the north, what became known as the Danelaw.
47:36And it's that split that gave the north and the east
47:39their distinctive dialects and place names till today.
47:44Blaston, that's named after Blath the Blade, from the Great Army.
47:50Slawston, that's Slugger the Sly.
47:54And Ilston-on-the-Hill, that's named after Iolfe,
47:57maybe Terry Eyliffe's ancestor.
48:01There's certainly plenty of evidence that the Anglo-Saxon women
48:04preferred the Vikings because they took a bath more often
48:07than Anglo-Saxon men.
48:09But I also think there's plenty of evidence
48:11that some Vikings sent home to bring the wife,
48:14as many immigrants do today, in fact.
48:17And once they have that control,
48:19then other people can come from Scandinavia
48:22who may not have been able to get married
48:24and other people can come from Scandinavia
48:27who may not have been soldiers or military people at all.
48:30They could have been families, they could have been immigrants
48:33with wives and children coming into an area
48:35that was controlled by members of their own.
48:38And there's plenty of evidence in the region we're talking about
48:41of Vikings moving in onto the less desirable land.
48:44These would be these later immigrants, I think.
48:46There's place names near Kibworth,
48:48which suggest, you know, the thorny place, the bushy place.
48:53There's one that I think says a fringe place.
48:55And even better, there's one with a thin coating of grass,
48:59as if it was a rather miserable place.
49:01So that might suggest that the Vikings who moved there
49:05are really accepting second-rate land.
49:09Places don't necessarily change their names
49:11just because other people move in.
49:14In the area around Kibworth, something like 82% of those names
49:17are of Old English origin.
49:19But if you look at the minor names, the field names,
49:21there's lots of evidence that the Scandinavian language was spoken there.
49:25Kibworth found itself the wrong side of the partition line,
49:29but it stayed English.
49:32The Vikings didn't go in for ethnic cleansing.
49:35They settled and mixed,
49:37and soon the languages and place names mingled.
49:40Now, if you want to see what it was like on the ground
49:42when the Vikings settled here,
49:44just come to the back end of Kibworth, at Smeaton, Westerby.
49:48That posh house there, the red brick, that's Smeaton.
49:52English, the smith's ton.
49:55But if you just go a few yards along the ridge,
49:58those houses there through the trees, that's Westerby.
50:02Vesterbyr, the Viking for the western farm.
50:06Some Viking warriors settled there after the army disbanded in 877
50:11and made a new life.
50:14And all round the landscape,
50:16there's a wonderful mix of English names and Viking names.
50:20This, for example, is the Fleet.
50:24That's Viking, Fliot, for a little stream.
50:29This area here is what else but a car.
50:33Viking speech for a sort of boggy area covered with brushwood.
50:38And all around us in the fields there are tofts,
50:41and farms, and slangs, that's droveways, and even better,
50:46over there, there's Crackley.
50:51Now, the Lee part of that name is Anglo-Saxon and it means a wood,
50:55but the crack is Viking.
50:58Cracker, meaning a raven.
51:01Raven's wood.
51:04So by 1,000 years ago, the basic map of the village is already complete.
51:09Viking, Westerby, English, Smeaton, the two halves of Kibworth.
51:15A mix of English and Vikings with the deep DNA of the Celts,
51:20the Roman Britons.
51:27In the 10th century, Kibworth became part of a kingdom
51:30of all England, with a king who mainly spent his time down in London,
51:34or Windsor.
51:38So we started this search knowing nothing about the village before 1066.
51:43But thanks to the villagers, we'd found a whole new history.
51:48And by the side of the A6, we even found traces
51:51of Kibworth's last Anglo-Saxon lord.
51:55Sat at home, opened the bag, emptied it onto the desk,
51:57and my chin hit the desk and not my neck on the pottery. It's incredible.
52:00I really felt that we'd wasted everybody's time.
52:03Quite, quite the reverse.
52:08Elfridge, the thane of Kibworth.
52:11This is in four contexts, so you're talking a 40cm thick layer.
52:15Oh, that came from all different contexts?
52:18Context five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
52:24And it's all late Saxon.
52:26Isn't that amazing? It really is.
52:28This particular pottery type is called St Neots Wor.
52:30It's about the earliest late Saxon pottery you get in this part of the world.
52:33Now, your test pit was the only test pit in the village to produce St Neots Wor.
52:38Nobody else produced any St Neots Wor at all.
52:40So that instantly makes it a candidate for early late Saxon settlement.
52:45St Neots Wor starts about 900.
52:47Stamford Wor comes in, which is the next late Saxon pottery type,
52:52around about 950, 975.
52:55We've got one or two bits of Stamford Wor.
52:57This is the Stamford Wor.
52:59Oh, gosh, that looks a bit posher, doesn't it?
53:01I think I remember when that was dug up,
53:03we saw all that is definitely part of a pot, not just a stone.
53:07That sticks us in the second half of the 10th century.
53:10950 onwards.
53:12The clincher is these two rim sherds from the St Neots Wor pots.
53:17Now, I don't know if you can see those, but the shape of those,
53:20they're from a particular type of cooking pot, specialist cooking pot.
53:23They're known as cylindrical jars, but we call them top hat pots.
53:26Imagine a top hat turned upside down.
53:28That's exactly what it looks like.
53:30Straight sides, then straight out and more or less straight across the bottom.
53:33Some of these pots have actually been used for cooking.
53:35If you look at the rim, can you see all the soot still stuck to the rim?
53:38Ah, that's what it is.
53:39Yeah, it's where the pot's been set on the fire.
53:41You think it was just the soil that had affected it?
53:43No, the pot's been set on fire, the smoke's come up and it's sooted all along the rim.
53:47That's part of a base of a pot.
53:50It's got this thick black and white residue stuck to the inside, can you see that?
53:53That's actually the burnt remains of the last meal that was cooked in the pot.
53:57The food?
53:58That's Anglo-Saxon food or the carbonised remains of it, certainly.
54:01We've got very early Stanford work, top hat pots.
54:04It's got to date to about 950 to 975.
54:06That is remarkable.
54:08I have to keep my eyes open now when I'm digging.
54:10Well, now the boring document historian speaks.
54:15And it changes every time Paul sends an email.
54:19I got this email about three days ago saying,
54:21I think we've hit the jackpot with hole number two.
54:25And that's why we're here.
54:27But here's the village, the peasants' tenements there maybe,
54:31and this side may be the lord's field.
54:34Now right in the middle of that, and that's that pink spot there, is here, is this.
54:39And, in fact, when we get on to 1066,
54:43I can tell you who may well have lived on this spot,
54:47because his name was Alfredge in 1066,
54:51and we can tell you who Alfredge's father was, who was called Meriet,
54:55which is quite an unusual Anglo-Saxon name, but you pick it up in the 1030s.
54:59So you're touching the Anglo-Saxon predecessors in Kibworth Harcourt.
55:05As this is the only place where we've found St Neotsworth,
55:08I don't think it's unreasonable to say this is where it all started,
55:11after the Vikings were sorted out.
55:13It's mind-boggling, really, when you think about it in context.
55:17So, basically, we're going to have to dig up your entire garden.
55:32There's a final chapter in this first part of the story.
55:38England was a rich prize,
55:40and in October 1066, the Normans won it at the Battle of Hastings.
55:49And ever after, the English have wanted to replay the match,
55:52hoping there'll be a different result this time.
55:55People still cheer more for the Saxons than they do for the Normans today.
55:58Yeah, and they know we're going to lose, but they still cheer.
56:01They still want us to win.
56:03Maybe Kibworth men went down to fight with their Lord Alfredge,
56:07stood in the shield wall,
56:09and fell there with the flower of the English nation.
56:14A disaster. The end of the world as we know it.
56:18Nothing was familiar any more, and we were.
56:22The language was oppressed.
56:25Our way of life was oppressed for such a long time.
56:28Just to let you know that the car park will be closing shortly,
56:32as indeed the gates will be also.
56:35What does it feel like,
56:37as you suddenly have this new world coming on top of you?
56:41It's not. It's the end of the world.
56:43It's not a new world, it's the finish.
56:45The end of the world. The end of the world. It's a disaster.
56:48It was finished. Yeah, yeah.
56:50But it wasn't. A new England did emerge, didn't it? It did.
56:53Because we're resilient. Ah!
56:55And I think that's just so wonderful.
56:58October the 14th, 1066, was a catastrophe for the English people.
57:04A havoc of our dear nation, as a chronicler said.
57:08And, of course, the English people never forgot it.
57:16So how did the villagers respond to this disaster
57:20of conquest and war and brutality?
57:24How did it shape them and change them?
57:27How did they become us?
57:33Use this space for your conclusions
57:35about how well your test pitch excavation went.
57:40So ancient Britons and Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings,
57:43those are our roots.
57:45And just... Yeah, if you just find one.
57:48But that's just the beginning.
57:50Next in the story of England,
57:52the Normans, the open fields, the English pub.
57:55How are you?
57:57We feel neglected.
57:59Oh!
58:01And the voice of the ordinary English people.
58:04Quite hard work. Yeah.
58:06One, two, three...
58:08ALL CHEER
58:10One, two, three...
58:12ALL CHEER
58:32A very, very big thanks to you all. It's really been great.
58:41Oh, my God, look at this place!
58:44ALL CHEER