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00:00We're following the story of one place through the whole of English history,
00:06from the Romans right up to the present day.
00:10We found some teeth.
00:13Yeah.
00:14And...
00:15Some Roman pottery.
00:16Yeah, Roman pottery, two pieces.
00:19That is a piece of an Anglo-Saxon bone cone.
00:22Around 500 maybe.
00:24The place is Kibworth in Leicestershire, in the heart of England,
00:28where, through archaeology, science and documents,
00:30we're trying to tell the story of the ordinary English people.
00:35Press those in, right foot on that...
00:38From open field farming to the coming of industry, canals and railways.
00:44We left Kibworth after the horrors of the Black Death,
00:47when two-thirds of the villagers died.
00:50Emma Cook, Agnes Polly, Robert Polly,
00:54Mr Haynes, John and Constance Sybil.
00:58But from this time, changes begin in English society,
01:02which will eventually turn us into the first modern industrial nation.
01:07So now we're going to take the story of the village on
01:10from the aftermath of the Black Death to the age of the Tudors.
01:14Now, in the national narrative,
01:16this is the time of the Hundred Years' War and the Wars of the Roses,
01:19but for the ordinary people of England,
01:21much more important things were happening at grassroots level,
01:24in the rise of education, in money and jobs and mobility,
01:28and the beginnings of freedom of thought.
01:31And all these things we can see working themselves out here in our village.
01:36This is the time when the character of the English people,
01:39as we would recognise it,
01:41begins to be recognisable for the first time.
01:51ORGAN PLAYS
02:22BIRDS CHIRP
02:32In summer 1381, England was convulsed by revolution.
02:38The Peasants' Revolt.
02:40With London swamped by peasant armies, the kingdom teetered on the brink.
02:46The Peasants' Revolt had come out of the social upheavals
02:49following the Black Death.
02:54With the population decimated by plague,
02:56there was a surge of protest by ordinary people
02:59against the labour laws, the class structure
03:02and the extravagance of the rich.
03:04Here in Smithfield, the peasant leader Watt Tyler
03:07confronted the young King Richard II
03:11with the peasants' demands for justice.
03:15CHANTING
03:18As the peasant armies rampaged across England,
03:21one force arrived in Market Harborough, just south of Kibworth.
03:27A local eyewitness tells the story.
03:30''The rebels were expected next day at dawn,'' says Henry Knighton,
03:34''and scouts were sent out on the road south
03:37''to try to find out where the rebels were and what they were doing.''
03:41But none of them came back with either good news or bad.
03:52''So men's hearts trembled with fear,'' says Knighton,
03:57''and all they could do was await divine providence
04:00''without which nothing survives.''
04:04And divine providence must have seemed the only explanation
04:08for the peasants' defeat.
04:10When their leader was murdered, his army lost their nerve and fell apart.
04:14In the Midlands, the rebels never made it those last five miles to Kibworth.
04:22But the changes demanded by the peasants would come,
04:25whether the government liked it or not.
04:29And as happens so often in history,
04:32these changes came silently, not by violent revolution.
04:37And the first crucial development was in education.
04:41Good morning.
04:43Robin knows that I'm coming, but can I get a day pass?
04:47You can.
04:48Yeah, that's great.
04:49Hints of hope were given to the peasants,
04:52and they set off on their way to Kibworth.
04:55You can?
04:56Yeah, that's great.
04:57Hints of how education might have begun in medieval Kibworth
05:01have recently turned up in Leicestershire County Record Office.
05:08As in every county in England, the office holds the local records,
05:12which we can all access to explore our history.
05:17And here they go back to the 1100s.
05:21Our function really started as looking after the records of the county council.
05:27But, of course, once you build a repository,
05:30you begin to take in all sorts of things,
05:33and we take in now anything relating to the life of Leicestershire,
05:38Leicester and Rutland.
05:39Yeah.
05:41We have records of institutions, clubs, societies,
05:45the Leicestershire Regiment, the cricket club,
05:48the football club, all sorts of things here.
05:51The tale starts with an extraordinary rediscovery,
05:55the archive of the old Kibworth Grammar School.
05:58Now, you'll appreciate that a colleague has been listing it.
06:01So, the first two boxes, the early stuff, is here.
06:08And the really oldest material, going back to the 1350s, is in this box.
06:16As you see.
06:17To the 1350s?
06:18The 1350s, yes.
06:20I cannot believe it. How about that?
06:23They were put into the hands of the then county record office.
06:27And I'm ashamed to say they more or less stayed as they'd arrived.
06:32They were boxed, because they're not in the metal D-box that they came in.
06:36Yeah.
06:37But apart from that, they've remained pretty much as they arrived ever since.
06:42So, you're seeing, you know, a privileged view, if you like,
06:47of a collection almost untouched by human hands.
06:52The documents are still being catalogued,
06:54but they include gifts of land by medieval Kibworth farmers,
06:58which were later owned by the village school.
07:02Just imagine these deeds refer to only one little group of properties in one parish.
07:10Imagine how many documents there would have been relating to Kibworth
07:15in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries.
07:18Imagine all the people who were writing these things.
07:22And that gives you an idea of the extent of literacy in the Middle Ages.
07:30We're not just talking about one literate man every 20 miles.
07:34I mean, they're all over the place.
07:38And they're writing and they're writing and they're writing.
07:41The Vilayne serf tenants had their own seals.
07:47They issued charters when they were buying and selling property.
07:52It's absolutely amazing, isn't it?
07:54And these are all just mixed up, actually, aren't they?
07:57There's 14th century stuff here, 17th century.
08:01This is going to be about 14th century.
08:04Yeah.
08:05And it's written in nice, clear Latin.
08:08Sciant presentes et futuri.
08:11Be it known to all those present and future, I'm translating,
08:15that we, Richard Bryan of Smeaton in the county of Leicester
08:20and William Parker of Kibworth.
08:23Kibworth Harcourt, yes.
08:25In the same county.
08:26Now, this is nice.
08:27The word husband men suddenly turns up amid the Latin.
08:32We don't really have a word in Latin for husband men.
08:35If we did give them some weird classical Latin name,
08:39it might detract from the legality of it,
08:42because a lawyer would always be able to argue it didn't apply to them.
08:46So, for safety's sake, we revert to English here.
08:50Husband men.
08:52And then we go back to Latin, deidimus concessimus,
08:55we have given, conceded, and by this, our present charter,
09:00we have confirmed, and so on and so on.
09:02So we're passing on from us to another group
09:07this particular little plot of land,
09:10and the money from the land is being used to, say,
09:15masses for the dead souls of the guild members.
09:20So these local farmers were paying for what was called a chantry priest
09:25to say prayers for the dead.
09:30But chantry priests were literate men, often villagers,
09:33who also acted as schoolmasters.
09:36From the 1360s, this was happening all over England,
09:39a silent revolution from the bottom of society.
09:44It's how our medieval ancestors organised their lives.
09:48Hedged by plague, war, and want, the ever-present threat of famine,
09:53they were practical people.
09:56For the 200 or 300 plague survivors in Kibweth and their children,
10:00education was a path to the future.
10:05By this time, hundreds of villagers up and down the land
10:08had their own tiny grammar schools, or their schoolteachers.
10:12By the time we reached the Tudors,
10:15England was the most literate society that had yet existed in human history.
10:23The Tudors were the only people in the world
10:26who were able to read and write.
10:30And, amazingly, Kibweth High School still owns
10:33what today are known as the school lambs.
10:36These have provided the school with income for hundreds of years.
10:40This is Peter. Hi, Peter.
10:42So we set out to try to trace one of the medieval gifts
10:46that we'd found in the school box.
10:50We were looking for just one bequest
10:52out of the many made by the villagers over the centuries.
10:55I, Robert, son of Nick Poley, of Kibweth Harcourt,
10:59give one house, ten acres, and one rood in the fields,
11:03and a dole of meadow in Kibweth Harcourt,
11:06to the Tudors of Kibweth High School.
11:09I, Robert, son of Nick Poley, of Kibweth Harcourt,
11:12give one house, ten acres, and one rood in the fields,
11:15and a dole of meadow in Kibweth Harcourt,
11:18to the Tudors of Kibweth Harcourt.
11:21I, Richard White, of Smeaton,
11:23give the annual rents of the following land in Smeaton,
11:26previously gifted us by William Weston.
11:30The gift of a house lying between the house of John Poley on the north
11:35and the King's Highway on the east.
11:39Now, when Kibweth's medieval open fields
11:42were finally swept away in 1779, during the enclosures,
11:46a new pattern was imposed on the landscape.
11:50But on the new map, they still marked the old school field.
11:57So we wondered whether the old pattern left by the medieval plough
12:01could be traced back to the old school field.
12:04So we wondered whether the old pattern left by the medieval ploughman
12:08could still be traced on the ground.
12:16I was expecting to see the canal here.
12:19Oh, it's here. Fantastic. How about that?
12:22Shall we picnic here? As good a place as any?
12:25Our plan was to try to locate one ten-acre bequest
12:29from the Poley family in 1358.
12:35OK, team, let me just show you...
12:38Let me just show you what I think is the story.
12:41This is the tithe map from 1781, so it's just before the canal was built.
12:46We've walked along Mill, if they call it Mill Road then,
12:49and here you can see school land, that's where we're heading.
12:52Absolutely incredible, isn't it?
12:54Gifts of land being made by local farmers right back into the 14th century
12:58that eventually became part of what the school held.
13:01Martin, you were saying, to my surprise, when I first saw this stuff,
13:05that the lands are still held by the school today?
13:08Yes, the school still owns the lands today and gets rents off the lands,
13:13which now go towards grants for pupils to go to university.
13:18And subsequently it's been changed for apprenticeships as well.
13:23Is there still a board of trustees?
13:25The governors now are basically the trustees of the school.
13:29Are basically the trustees of the funds, yes.
13:31Great stuff, what an amazing story.
13:37Cool, that looks very nice.
13:41Shall we pack up?
13:51From mapping the pattern of the medieval furrows,
13:54we suspected that a little square field in the middle of the school lands
13:58was one of these medieval legacies.
14:02Its rent would have been a useful contribution to a rural teacher's pay,
14:06about £5 a year.
14:10The school lands grew over time, a trust for future generations.
14:15As yet there was no permanent building,
14:17but the village had a teacher, as it has ever since.
14:21Farming weather.
14:24Proper farming weather.
14:26It's natural for it.
14:28It's natural for it, yes, you know.
14:30At the end of a wet day, we met up with Morgan Pearce,
14:33who rents the field from the school today.
14:36What's the length of the whole length of it here?
14:39Did you work it out?
14:41305 metres.
14:43And Morgan was able to help us spot the ridge and furrow patterns
14:47that could pin down the old ten-acre field.
14:50How many books did you go over?
14:52Oh, loads.
14:53I told you to go where the wheel is, I've done that earlier.
14:56It was when we did it on that side.
14:58Yeah.
14:59OK.
15:00On the other side of the hedge.
15:02That's cheating.
15:04No, it wasn't.
15:05The school field drawn on the 18th-century map
15:08we measured at just over 300 yards long,
15:11but inside it we thought we'd found an older field about 100 yards square.
15:16This is the field edge that they've measured,
15:19and what it looks like was, if we align it round here,
15:22tell us, Morgan, there seems to have been a change in the ridge and furrow
15:25halfway down, is that right?
15:27Well, it's just in the distance here, about 200 yards.
15:31Oh, yeah.
15:32Well, you can actually see the hump here, and that is that there.
15:36Yeah.
15:37So it's definitely a change in alignment, isn't it, where that hump is?
15:40Yeah.
15:41And that's what we've got halfway along the field.
15:43Yeah, yeah.
15:44Tremendous.
15:45So when was it ploughed up, the ridge and furrow?
15:47You don't call it ridge, do you here?
15:49Rig and furrow.
15:50Rig and furrow.
15:51Rig and furrow.
15:52Fantastic.
15:53When was it ploughed?
15:54I think it was ploughed late 50s.
15:58Right.
15:59Yeah, yeah.
16:00And Mr Smith.
16:01So there it was, an almost invisible medieval field,
16:05perhaps the one given by the Poleys in 1358.
16:0920 whatever it is from.
16:1124.
16:1224 days to plough it.
16:14The ridge and furrow was, and the acres were worked out,
16:18is what you could plough with a pair of horses in one day.
16:22In one day, yeah.
16:23And everybody's acre was different.
16:25Yeah, yeah, on different land or different, yeah.
16:27Yeah, well, heavier the land.
16:28And what does that mean?
16:30You can see here where it hasn't grown very well,
16:32that's heavier than where it's nice and green.
16:35All right.
16:39From the 1400s, education was a part of village life.
16:43When these farmers set up their bequest,
16:46they were paying for a priest who could also teach.
16:49And proof that young people in the village did get an education
16:53comes in a letter written in 1447
16:56to the fellows of Merton College, Oxford,
16:58on behalf of the village butcher, John Pitchard,
17:02describing the talents of a boy in the village.
17:06Most worshipful and reverent Lord,
17:09I commend me unto your worthy lordship,
17:11desiring to hear of your prosperity and bodily health.
17:16Sir, we have a young man with us,
17:19the witch is a goodly scholar and a grammarian
17:22after the form of the country,
17:24and a likely man of person to do you service.
17:28He is the son of one of your tenants, that is to say,
17:31the son of Agnes Palmer.
17:34The man deserves to have knowledge over all things.
17:39We pray you, all your tenants, that you would cherish him.
17:44And forsooth, you will like his condition,
17:48have you assayed him a while,
17:50both for governance and for person.
17:54No more at this time, but almighty God have you in his keeping,
17:58written at Kibworth on the feast of St Hugh the Martyr,
18:03your own man and poor servant, John Pitchard.
18:09It's a wonderful document, isn't it?
18:11It may be the first surviving letter
18:13composed by an English peasant,
18:15and it tells us all sorts of interesting things.
18:17Widow Palmer's son already knew his Latin grammar.
18:21Just as interesting is the fact that the ordinary peasants of Kibworth,
18:25the tenants, felt that they could deal directly
18:28with the scholars of Merton College
18:30and recommend their own children for higher education.
18:34The concept comes from canon law
18:37that if you draw revenue from land, you must give something back.
18:43And the concept that was evolved was scholars,
18:48poor scholars from the villages.
18:51And the thing which I think is very interesting about that
18:54is that when you come to the 16th century,
18:58a fellow of the college called John Jewell,
19:01who is the future Bishop of Exeter
19:04and the writer of the Apology for the Church of England,
19:10he says that it's more important that they should have wit than anything else.
19:17He doesn't actually say five A-levels.
19:25So education mattered to ordinary people in the Middle Ages,
19:29but so too did material advancement.
19:32In one big dig, the people of Kibworth had dug 55 test pits across the village,
19:38which had shown us the fluctuations of the village through the Middle Ages.
19:42A tale of almost a living...
19:44Well, it is a living community, isn't it?
19:46I was going to say a living organism, but a living community...
19:49If you sort of go right back to the beginning,
19:51you can see the settlement growing, appears when it bursts into life.
19:54But as for what happened after the Black Death,
19:56the finds in the ground had us perplexed.
19:59The population collapses and then seems to stagnate.
20:01I don't know, of course, if this happened...
20:03You know, if this is exactly what it looked like in 1400,
20:06it may have been more of a gradual decline.
20:08But you'd really have to say that both of these sites almost could be...
20:11Certainly Smeaton, Westerby and Kibworth Beach
20:14really could have been deserted villages at that time.
20:17And there are plenty of deserted villages in Leicestershire.
20:20But, of course, these don't remain deserted because they're lived in today.
20:23Even to the 1550, there's been a stagnation between...
20:27For 200 years, virtually, hasn't it?
20:29What happens? Is there a change in the psychology
20:32after the famines and the Black Death?
20:34It would be fascinating to know, wouldn't it?
20:36Something like that, which would have killed
20:38anything between a quarter and three quarters of the population,
20:41would just have hugely impacted on everyone's attitude to life, death,
20:48their whole security of existence for generations to come.
20:56And it did.
20:57But for the survivors, there were greater opportunities
21:00in jobs, in mobility and in making money,
21:04as we can see in the late 14th century tax records of Kibworth,
21:09now kept in the National Archive.
21:13So this is one of the great documents of English history.
21:16This is the poll tax of 1381,
21:19the tax that caused the Peasants' Revolt.
21:21Imposed by corrupt, incompetent, insolvent government,
21:25it was a universally hated tax,
21:27but it gives us a wonderful insight into the jobs
21:31and the new wealth of some of our villagers.
21:35And here's the people of Kibworth.
21:37The familiar families here who survived the Black Death,
21:40the Gilberts, the Poleys,
21:43Adam Brown and his wife Joanna, um, Drapers.
21:51Brown's is a story of upward mobility,
21:54and it starts in a house in Main Street, Kibworth,
21:57later known as Brown's Place.
22:00Oh, this is amazing, isn't it?
22:02Just look at this.
22:05What an extraordinary feature this is, Nick.
22:08That's absolutely... That's a wonderful thing, isn't it?
22:10Incredible, isn't it?
22:11It's a very fine example of what's called a dragon beam.
22:14Nothing to do with dragons,
22:15it's actually just a corruption of the word diagonal.
22:18They were actually trying to get a jetty, an overhang,
22:22out of the building on that side, and also on that side.
22:25Done really very much for show.
22:27Long before Ian and Rosemary Williamson,
22:29a string of village Reeves lived in the house over the centuries.
22:33Poleys, Clarks and Browns.
22:36An earlier phase of the house here, are we, Nick?
22:38This looks massive and old.
22:40It's absolutely enormous, that beam, isn't it?
22:42I mean, they did like to build with good sound timbers
22:46in the Middle Ages, but that one really does look over the top.
22:51One of these marks here.
22:53They're little scorch marks.
22:54Before they had proper beeswax candles,
22:56they had rushes just dipped in tallow and so on,
23:00and they would use them regularly as taper lights.
23:04And you do see these sort of scorch marks,
23:07which is rather alarming sometimes when you think...
23:10And open all the way to the roof.
23:12Open all the way up to the roof,
23:14and with the open half in the centre and the smoke drifting up,
23:17and that was how they liked it to be.
23:19Yeah, great, impressive space.
23:21Any chance we could shine a torch into the roof?
23:24You can do, if you like.
23:30Where we saw those studs rising up from the tyre beam,
23:33they come up and they joint right into that huge, great collar,
23:36and then you've got the original rafter,
23:38and then that little cut-out, that shows you what type of roof it was.
23:42Just like houses today, over the generations,
23:45there were many rebuilds and extensions.
23:50If they had a lot of people sleeping in this room at any one time,
23:54they would have presumably, in each of these parts
23:56where you've got the beams done across, would have had hangings.
23:59And still a bedroom today. Oh, yes.
24:01It's a lovely bedroom, it's got a lovely atmosphere.
24:05It's rather magic, isn't it?
24:07Feeling all these rather benign ghosts of the Browns and the Poles
24:11and the Clerks and the rest, don't you think?
24:14Well, I think it brings it to life, doesn't it, really? Yeah.
24:18But with the medieval building accounts from Merton,
24:21we can itemise every last laugh-nail.
24:241477, the Clerks rented for 30 years
24:28a tenement in Kibworth called Brownness Place,
24:32with three-and-a-half vergades of land.
24:351448 are the expenses made out between Easter and the Feast of St Michael
24:40for the building of a hall and the stables and things like that.
24:44For Browns Place.
24:46So the great question is, is this a new build of 1448?
24:52I mean, the only real way to absolutely establish it
24:55would be the tree-ring dating, really, which would absolutely tie it down.
24:59Would you be game to have it tree-ring dated?
25:02Yeah, why not? Why not? Yeah?
25:04Because the tree-ring dating, I mean, if you get a felling date of, you know,
25:081447 for the timbers and here's it being built in 1448,
25:11then, you know, that would absolutely nail it down.
25:18So having already dug test pits in Rosemary and Ian's lawn,
25:22we were now going to drill holes in their main beam.
25:31OK.
25:34Oh, that's a...
25:36That's a good core, that is.
25:38Now, that's plenty of rings on it.
25:40Got the sapwood.
25:42You ought to get some sort of result out of that.
25:56Each of those beeps is the measurement of a ring.
25:59Each one of those is a measurement in hundredths of a millimetre.
26:04As you can see, the ring widths vary, you know, quite noticeably.
26:11The accounts of Merton College, Oxford,
26:13seem to be referring to a construction of a building
26:17or a part of a building or an extension or a renewal of a building in 1448.
26:21Oh, right. Interestingly enough.
26:23They give us a little bit of an idea of what that means.
26:26Oh, really? Oh, that would be very, very interesting.
26:32What I think is that the north wing,
26:35the timbers of the north wing,
26:37all fell sometime between, let's say, 1325 and, let's say, 1350,
26:43but the hall range, where that large beam was...
26:46That's when you go up the stairs and there's that huge timber across.
26:49That's right. That's right.
26:51OK.
26:53We've got an accurate date, a very precise date,
26:55and that timber and all the other timbers in that range
26:58are probably felled in 1385,
27:00and that's an absolutely precise date.
27:03Well, I'm amazed.
27:05Well, I can see you're almost speechless.
27:07I'll tear up the documentary research, you know.
27:11There's me thinking I was being precise with 1448.
27:16So the house had at least three medieval buildings in it.
27:20So the house had at least three medieval building phases,
27:24and the back part was much earlier than we'd thought.
27:27And in 1385, it may have been lived in
27:30by Adam and Joanna Brown of Main Street.
27:37Now, Adam and Joanna were among a number of villagers
27:40who started businesses away from Kibworth at that time,
27:44in the boom town of the Middle Ages, Coventry.
27:51MUSIC CONTINUES
27:57This is St Mary's Guildhall in Coventry,
28:00one of our finest and least-known medieval buildings.
28:04Isn't this wonderful?
28:06If you want an image of the civic pride of the 14th-century world,
28:10this is it.
28:12The town feasts, the Corpus Christi festivals.
28:17This was the communal hall for the Brethren and the Sisteren
28:20of the Guild of the Holy Trinity.
28:23This is the world to which upwardly mobile families
28:26like the Browns of Kibworth aspired.
28:31To learn more, I met up with a local expert, Dave McCrory.
28:35You can tell me more about this, I think.
28:37I mean, what an incredible age this must have been for this city.
28:41What was the population then, do we know?
28:445,000, the population was at that point, yeah.
28:47And at this time, lots of foreigners, as they said.
28:51And that's a term they used then, the foreigners came in.
28:54And they took up residence.
28:57And late in that same year,
29:00they say that basically the population is just over half is foreigners.
29:06Wow.
29:07Yeah, all these aspiring people looking for the trade,
29:10because in the end, Coventry had this great...
29:14It was just rising, it does this country, it goes up.
29:17It gets blown up occasionally, but it keeps coming up again.
29:20I'm pursuing one village in Leicestershire,
29:23and exactly as you said, in the aftermath of the Black Death,
29:27quite a few of them start coming here.
29:31Kibworth people were working here from the 1360s,
29:34the Godyers, the Haynes and the Browns.
29:37Adam Brown of Kibworth and his wife, who's Joan, Joanna,
29:42they are recorded as Drapers.
29:45But by 1405, they're in Coventry,
29:49and they call themselves of Kibworth and Coventry.
29:52So they're exactly what you're talking about
29:54in terms of strangers and foreigners, aren't they?
29:56They actually were members of this guild.
29:59Wow.
30:00This is their home.
30:01They would have come in here, yeah.
30:03Terrific. They were here?
30:04They were here.
30:05Oh, God.
30:06You're amazing.
30:07Terrific.
30:08And, of course, being a member of this guild had important things.
30:11It's a stepping stone to become, say,
30:15even an alderman or a member of a council.
30:17This was considered that as well.
30:19This was a stepping stone for your way up,
30:21and it was also, of course, a stepping stone for your business,
30:24because, basically, to trade properly in Coventry,
30:27you have to be a member of this guild.
30:29And, of course, you would get cheap keyage in Bristol docks,
30:33and there were other perks elsewhere
30:35where they actually paid no market tolls and different things.
30:37Tell us about cheap keyage in Bristol docks.
30:39What does that involve?
30:40Basically, you could...
30:42They would store their wall or cloth at the docks,
30:45but the alderman of Bristol would make everyone else pay
30:50a full price for the storage.
30:52But if you were a member of this guild, you got a half price.
30:56Then you could export it abroad, and they exported all over Europe.
31:00Adam and Joan's son, William,
31:03marries Agnes, the daughter of Richard Doddenhall.
31:07Doddenhall.
31:08He was one of the early mayors of Coventry.
31:11They set up home in Earl Street, is it, close by?
31:14Yeah.
31:15A des res? A des res, is it, or...?
31:17Fairly des res. It's just the back of the hall in this direction.
31:21And it was some of the early good housing in the city.
31:26They're on an upward trajectory then, I suppose, socially, aren't they?
31:29They are, yeah. Aiming for the stars.
31:31Aiming for the stars. Fantastic.
31:34So through literacy and personal drive,
31:37even an English peasant could rise in the world.
31:40The Coventry they knew was destroyed by the bombers and the planners.
31:45But here's Earl Street where the Browns lived.
31:48And these are the streets where they shopped on their trips from Kibworth.
31:56We can trace ten generations of the Brown family.
31:59Each generation adding to the family nest egg.
32:06And the story doesn't end there with Adam's son William and his wife Agnes.
32:12Hi, Jane.
32:13Hi.
32:14You can find the sequel in another of Coventry's medieval secrets.
32:18Yes, this is one of our treasures. That's the first Leet Book.
32:21The Leet Book. And what a book it is.
32:25These are letters from winter 1485,
32:28the year Richard III was killed at the Battle of Bosworth
32:31at the end of the Wars of the Roses.
32:33This is Rob Only writing to his old friend in London, I think.
32:41He's writing to his old friend in London.
32:44He's writing to his old friend in London.
32:46He's writing to his old friend in London.
32:48He's writing to his old friend in London.
32:50He's writing to his old friend in London, I suppose,
32:55who's John Brown, who's the great-grandson of Will and Agnes
33:00who set up house in Earl Street, the Kibworthian.
33:04Write, worshipful sir,
33:06I recommend me unto you in my most hearty wise,
33:10desiring your welfare,
33:12and praying that you will give credence to the bringer of this letter.
33:17He's writing to him, asking him to consider being the next mayor of the city.
33:22It ends here.
33:24Written at Coventry, your true lover, Rob Only,
33:28mayor of the city of Coventry,
33:30to the right worshipful John Brown be this delivered.
33:33Brown is now working as a mercer in London,
33:36so the family history has taken them as drapers and mercers
33:39from Kibworth to Coventry and then to London.
33:42May we see what John's reply is.
33:47Write, worshipful and my very good master,
33:50I recommend me to you,
33:52thanking you in full heartly wise for your letter,
33:56and that it hath pleased you so to remember me as you have done,
34:00and of me never in any wise deserved.
34:03Sort of self-deprecating, isn't it? It's very, very sweet.
34:06As for mayor, I think myself full unable thereto.
34:11His business commitments as a mercer now in London are just too great.
34:15But, he adds, I trust it should be my fortune hereafter
34:20something to do that shall be to your pleasure.
34:24Written at London, the Monday next
34:26after the feast of the circumcision of our lord,
34:29yours, Jay Brown.
34:32You could hardly have a more perfect example
34:37of the rise of a family who started off as villains
34:41in the documents at Merton College in the 1280s
34:44to live 15 acres in a cottage
34:47and to rise through hard work, through canny business dealings
34:52and clearly through social skills to become, well, middle class.
34:58This, too, is the English story.
35:02So, with education and literacy came material advancement.
35:07But the third of our invisible changes was the push for freedom of thought.
35:13In the 14th century, an attempted religious revolution
35:16was to shake the foundations of the English church and state.
35:23Back home in the village, away from the fields and the family house,
35:27the centre of the peasants' lives was the parish church.
35:3314th-century font.
35:34And in the late 1300s, St Wilfrid's in Kibworth was extensively rebuilt.
35:39Look up here.
35:4114th-century as well, post-Black Death.
35:44Funded by the villagers themselves,
35:46the rebuilding gave them a beautiful new spire.
35:50A lovely oak screen here.
35:53Just look at this.
35:55It's a late 14th-century screen made of oak.
35:59Beautiful.
36:00A little window here.
36:01They used to call these lepers' windows, didn't they,
36:04where the sick, the infirm,
36:06the people who were suffering from disease could look in.
36:11For people of the time, it would have been a bit of a shock of the new.
36:15Previously, the church would have had those clunky Norman pillars,
36:19lots of shadow, and suddenly the church has opened up.
36:23Beautiful light columns letting lots of light and air into the church.
36:30A real sense of being in the heavenly court.
36:34Two altars.
36:35The one in the north aisle was dedicated in honour of Our Lady of Kibworth.
36:40This is a miraculous image.
36:42A miraculous image? Wow.
36:46Often remembered in villagers' wills,
36:48she would have looked like the much more famous Virgin of Walsingham.
36:56The villagers belonged to a huge ecclesiastical empire.
37:04A vast diocese whose mother church was the Cathedral at Lincoln.
37:13The cathedral was really designed for visitors.
37:19For pilgrims coming from all over the country,
37:22you open the door and there's prayer going on.
37:27Now, there were over 50 charteries.
37:29They actually produced a timetable
37:31which the pilgrims would carry on continuously at each chapel,
37:36at each altar, all through the morning from about five o'clock until midday.
37:43But then, as now, the Church of Rome aroused both affection and hostility.
37:48Bitter accusations that in amassing secular power and wealth,
37:52it had departed from its pure apostolic mission.
38:02This is one of the great series of registers of the Bishops of Lincoln
38:06which start earlier in date than any other diocese,
38:10not only in medieval England but in the whole of Western Europe,
38:14simply because Lincoln was just such a vast diocese.
38:18Stretching from the Humber up in the north of Lincolnshire,
38:22right down to the Thames in South Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire.
38:27Getting on for 2,000 parish churches,
38:30we find that a Kibberworth entry.
38:33It's just here.
38:35Now, this is the free chapel of Kibberworth Harcourt.
38:39That's a chapel in a manor rather than a parish.
38:42And chapels could be of different types.
38:45The sort of lowest level was where the Lord of the Manor
38:48would have an oratory, a private chapel in his house.
38:51He would claim to the bishop that it was a long way to go to church,
38:55the way was muddy in winter or it was wet, he had to cross a river,
38:59or it was cold.
39:01There's one memorable example from the 1290s
39:04where the local Lord of the Manor said he needed to have a private chapel
39:08because his mother was very old and his wife was very fat
39:11and so they couldn't get to church.
39:14MUSIC PLAYS
39:26Page after page after page of individual legacies
39:30with the name of the person, the name of the place where they lived
39:34and down the end column here, the sum of money,
39:37usually fairly small, fourpence, sixpence, eightpence.
39:41I, Catherine Polly of Kibweth Harcourt,
39:45being sound of mind and memory, make this my testament in this manor.
39:52I leave to the Mother Church of Lincoln fourpence.
39:58I, Thomas Coleman of Kibweth, husbandman,
40:02give to the Mother Church of Lincoln fourpence.
40:06I, Elizabeth Clark of Kibweth Beecham,
40:10give to the Church of Lincoln tuppence.
40:15It must have been a sense of belonging.
40:19This was our diocese, this is the diocese,
40:22however huge, that we belonged to a group identity.
40:27Such were the bonds, both real and psychological,
40:30which held the people of Kibweth from the cradle to the grave.
40:35But in the late 14th century,
40:38that edifice of power was challenged by radical dissenters
40:42attempting to purge English Christianity of its corruption.
40:46They were known as the Lollards.
40:50And by an extraordinary coincidence,
40:52the story begins on the high table of the landlord of Kibweth Harcourt,
40:56Merton College, Oxford.
40:58The key figure was a brilliant and obstinate Yorkshireman, John Wycliffe.
41:04Wycliffe was a fellow of the college.
41:07He gets the title Flos Doctorum, the Flower of the Doctors.
41:12I mean, not just a Doctor of Theology,
41:15but the top Doctor of Theology in Oxford.
41:18So, a top mind of his day.
41:20A top mind of his day.
41:22He was a very, very good doctor.
41:25You see, Wycliffe had 101 things.
41:28One was the attack on transubstantiation in 1382.
41:32That is the key document that makes him a heretic
41:37that the Archbishop must clamp down on.
41:40He writes a thing called De Eucharistia, about the Eucharist.
41:45But until then, they try and play along with him
41:49and think, oh, he's just another of these clamps.
41:53But he challenges the payment of tithes and the worship of images.
42:01Wycliffe inspires a whole range of people.
42:06They hear his lectures and take them out
42:09into Leicestershire and Northamptonshire
42:12and into the villages.
42:16And in Kibworth and nearby villages,
42:19Lollardy became a popular movement.
42:22Unlicensed preachers, William Brown and Walter Gilbert,
42:26preaching their sermons in English.
42:28They realised that their language was English.
42:31Not Latin, not French, but English.
42:34People like Chaucer and others,
42:36they were preaching their sermons in English.
42:39They realised that their language was English.
42:42Not Latin, not French, but English.
42:44People like Chaucer, of course, you know, writing in English.
42:48And people proud to be English, speaking English, reading English.
42:53This gospel tells a lore of Christ.
42:56When he was 12-year-old,
43:00and this Lord is full of miracles, as other deeds...
43:04Written in East Midlands dialect,
43:06this book of Lollard's sermons was copied in secret somewhere near Kibworth.
43:10He went with Joseph and Mary unto Jerusalem,
43:15as they hadn't custom at Pasch.
43:18Easter. Easter, that's right.
43:20Easter time. That's right.
43:22For to make this pilgrimage.
43:24Pilgrimage!
43:28His father and his mother went on home
43:32and Christ left all one,
43:35all alone, yes, all one, in...
43:38In the city. In the city, that's right.
43:41In the age of Chaucer, English was a literary language again,
43:45but also, despite the teaching of the church, the language of God.
43:50For children hadn't in free custom
43:54to choose where that they walden wende.
43:59For children hadn't in free custom
44:03to choose where that they walden wende.
44:07Where they wanted to go. That's right.
44:09With mum or with dad?
44:11With father or with mother.
44:13And this Joseph wende that Christ had come with his mother.
44:20Yes.
44:21And Our Lady, his mother,
44:23supposed that Christ had come with Joseph.
44:27It's very... It's lovely kind of idiomatic people's speech.
44:32It's a lovely simple tale and it's in the language
44:35that people listening would understand.
44:38And at the heart of it, core idea in it all, Robin,
44:41is you've got to get back to the Bible text itself.
44:44Is that right? I mean, you know, that's what they're saying.
44:47I think, yes.
44:48Of course, you always want to get back to the word of God.
44:51You don't want the word of God filtered through somebody else,
44:54particularly someone else who you might have some reason not to trust.
45:01Lollard preachers from Kibworth, like William Brown and Walter Gilbert,
45:04preached what even today would be revolutionary ideas.
45:11That any good man may be a priest.
45:14Or any good woman.
45:18That every man may lawfully withdraw
45:21and withhold tithes and offerings from priests
45:25and give them straight to the poor people.
45:28That is more pleasing to God.
45:35You don't need a church to marry you.
45:38A union of hearts is enough.
45:40A bad priest can't be a priest.
45:46That the Pope of Rome is Father Antichrist
45:49and false in all his workings,
45:52a false extortioner and a deceiver of the people.
45:57Lollard books were publicly burned wherever they could be found.
46:03And soon the preachers would be, too.
46:08The Lollards were part of a pan-European movement
46:11in revolt against the forms and practices of the Catholic Church.
46:15And here in England, the government,
46:18the church and the clergy,
46:20were all part of that movement.
46:23Now, the Lollards had a secret underground network.
46:28But in the Merton archives, we can pick up their trail.
46:33So, what's the document, first of all, Julian?
46:36Well, it's one of the Bursar's Accounts rolls.
46:39There were three Bursars.
46:41One of them was the Bursar's Accounts,
46:43and the other one was the Bursar's Accounts.
46:46And the Bursar's Accounts was a document
46:49containing the Bursar's Accounts rolls.
46:51There were three Bursars,
46:53who each took four-month periods of the year.
46:55Because if you're looking for explanations
46:58as to how villagers become quite radicalised,
47:01if I can use that word, as Lollards in the early 15th century,
47:05there are clues to be found here, perhaps.
47:07Where that link may have come from.
47:09The first one is the vicar, Thomas Holman.
47:11He's vicar from 1380 onwards, so...
47:14He's here in 83, certainly.
47:17He might even have known Wycliffe, perhaps.
47:19Yeah.
47:20You see this expense of the custodians of the warden at Holman,
47:25was Quay London.
47:27So the warden and Holman doing business in London,
47:30and later on to Cambridge.
47:33A man who'd been for the Archbishop of Canterbury's investigators
47:38for his heretical opinions.
47:41So, back in the 1380s,
47:43the vicar of Kibworth had been a follower of Wycliffe.
47:47And in the 1390s, college fellows who were Lollard sympathisers
47:51made many journeys to Kibworth.
47:54One of them, the lawyer Rob Stoneham,
47:56absconded with money from the villagers.
48:00It's £10-something shillings, £10.09 or something,
48:04which is a substantial amount of money
48:06if you're carrying that on your person from Leicestershire to Oxford.
48:10Were they diverting funds to the cause?
48:13Copying those forbidden manuscripts? No-one knows.
48:17But the Merton documents also show that in Kibworth,
48:21two convicted Lollard heretics, Roger and Alice Dexter,
48:25were given a house by our old friend the draper Adam Brown.
48:33And for centuries afterwards,
48:35Kibworth would continue to be a haven of dissent.
48:38In the 17th century, there were independents, Quakers
48:41and Congregationalists here, though they're almost gone now.
48:46That's six old ladies and me, and they kept dying off.
48:52After the Civil War, dissent in Kibworth was once even put down by force.
48:57Was it 1662 or something it started?
49:01It was the centre of the social life in Kibworth Harcourt.
49:06The Bishop had the church and the Methodist chapel.
49:12There were two Baptist churches here at one point as well.
49:17What is it about Kibworth that makes it such an extraordinary centre
49:21of dissent and non-conformity?
49:24I honestly don't know what the reason was,
49:28except that maybe it was a useful centre between Market Harbour and Leicester
49:33and it drew in people from the area around.
49:39There'd been a dissenting academy, hadn't there?
49:42Yes. I was amazed when I was first at university.
49:45This was in Liverpool, doing education.
49:47They mentioned Kibworth Academy. I nearly fell off my seat.
49:54But back in 1414, after the death of King Henry IV,
49:58the village was swept up in the Lollards' bid to topple church and state.
50:04The new king was the young Henry V,
50:07who was soon to be the victor of Agincourt and a national hero.
50:12But not to the Lollards.
50:14To them, he was the son of a usurper and the agent of Antichrist,
50:18and their plan was to overthrow him and install a regent,
50:22the Lollard Sir John Oldcastle, in charge of a new order.
50:26All over England, the underground cells of the Lollards sent out their summonses,
50:31and here in Kibworth and in Smeaton,
50:34the call was answered by seven good men and true.
50:39Walter Gilbert.
50:40Simon Perry, alias Carter.
50:42John Barrow.
50:43Alias Tugard.
50:44Alias Scribner.
50:45John Upton.
50:47Henry Valentine.
50:48Nicholas Gilbert.
50:50John Blackmore, alias John Taylor of Lancashire.
50:56The rebels came from all over England,
50:58from East Anglia, the Midlands and the Cotswolds, Oxford and Bristol.
51:04They hoped to assemble an army of 20,000 men and overthrow King Henry V.
51:13They marched down to London to make a rendezvous
51:15in what were then fields just outside the city,
51:18near an ancient well, today's Clerkenwell.
51:21It's a real convergence place, isn't it?
51:23Yeah, well, I mean, it was the meat market.
51:25Yeah.
51:26Here's St John's.
51:27And this looks like Clerkenwell Green just here, doesn't it?
51:30Yeah.
51:31All the rebels who were coming down from the Midlands
51:34were told to meet at a tavern called the Wrestlers on the Hoof.
51:45Clarke's Well.
51:47It's still there.
51:48Yeah, isn't that fantastic?
51:50The spring by which it is supplied is situated four feet eastwards.
51:55In remote ages, annually were performed ancient sacred plays.
52:00Yeah, well, they must have happened right out here, you know.
52:03This sort of natural theatre here.
52:06So, it must have been either just over here or just over there.
52:12Apparently, they got on each other's shoulders
52:15and the people fought on top of each other's shoulders at each other.
52:19So, the great inn here, the Wrestlers on the Hoof?
52:23Wrestlers on the Hoof, yeah.
52:24Wrestlers on the Hoof.
52:25The Wrestlers on the Hoof was where all the rebels coming down from the north,
52:29from the Midlands, were all supposed to converge.
52:32They were supposed to meet here
52:34and then they were going to be told where to go next.
52:36Let's see whether we can find the next landmark.
52:39It was January 1414.
52:42Scriveners, parchment makers, drapers,
52:45the rebels were typical of the new literate English proletariat.
52:49So, did Roger and Alice move to Kipworth or maybe they were...?
52:53The rebels were to meet in St Giles' Fields,
52:57which is over by Tottenham Court Road.
52:59It was on the way to Westminster from Clerkenwell.
53:10So, what happened to the rebellion in the end?
53:13Well, the king got wind of it.
53:16He had a spy in his employ.
53:18The king's forces were already waiting for them,
53:20so there wasn't really any actual fighting, I don't think.
53:23They just captured a lot of people.
53:26Unfortunately for the Kipworth rebels,
53:28they were amongst those people who were summarily executed
53:32at the scene at St Giles' Field itself.
53:36Tragic story, though, wasn't it?
53:38Tragic story, yeah.
53:39A lot of what they were striving for, we can identify with today.
53:43Modern ideas that we would take for granted
53:46were things they were just aspiring toward.
53:49They were just people, free people, with their own ideas
53:54and their own destinies in their hands
53:57and trying to shape their worlds more than they had in the past.
54:10This is where the story ended.
54:15St Giles' in the Fields.
54:18Near this spot in 1417, Sir John Oldcastle, the Lollard,
54:24was hanged and burned.
54:29And with him, Walter and Nicholas Gilbert of Kipworth.
54:35And with him, Walter and Nicholas Gilbert
54:38of Kipworth Harcourt in Leicestershire.
54:48The Lollards have often been called
54:50the morning star of the Reformation, haven't they?
54:53Precursors of the Church of England.
54:56Well, possibly.
54:58I think, you know, if you look at them in a European context,
55:03they were regular groups
55:07that were seen as going off at a tangent from the rest of the Church.
55:13I think they were political overtones
55:17as well as theological ones.
55:21And that's why it was put down so sharply.
55:28The Kipworth Lollards, the Gilberts, Valentines and Browns,
55:32were the class of peasants who had benefited
55:34from the new opportunities in work and education.
55:38They failed, but their premature Reformation
55:40was the precursor of the great events of the 16th century
55:44under Henry VIII, when the Reformation finally came.
55:49You can imagine the reaction back here in Main Street in Kipworth.
55:53The public hanging and burning of two sons of the village.
55:58Village families here had been split over the issue.
56:02The Poles, Valentines, the Barons,
56:05all these families had been reeves and bailiffs,
56:08pillars of the community.
56:11Whether these ideas continue to run under the surface of life
56:15here in the village, we don't know.
56:17What you can be sure is that, like any community,
56:20the villagers just closed their curtains
56:24and got on with the business of making a living
56:27and improving their lives.
56:34So that's how those hidden changes in education, in work and in thought
56:39began a crucial shift in English society.
56:42And with them came changes in a key medieval institution, marriage.
56:47Welcome to this wonderful and very special occasion...
56:51From the 15th century, ordinary English men and women
56:54began to marry later, to have smaller families
56:57and to adopt new strategies of inheritance.
57:04And that would have a big influence on us.
57:10On population and wealth and property,
57:13on what will become known as English individualism.
57:16Therefore proclaim that they are husband and wife.
57:20That which God has joined together, that no man put asunder.
57:33To an outsider, in Tudor times, Kibworth still looked the same.
57:37Still an open-field village,
57:39still with many of the old families we've got to know since the 1200s.
57:43Absolutely gorgeous.
57:47The old families, there's the Foxes, there's the Bryans.
57:53The Sanders, they go back into the Middle Ages.
57:56But they're not peasants any more.
57:58From now on, they are almost modern people, like you or me.
58:04And in time, those changes will lead to the Protestant Reformation,
58:09the rise of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution.
58:14The next chapter in the story of England.
58:33Whoo!