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00:00We're following the story of the village of Kibworth in Leicestershire, from the Romans
00:16until today.
00:20With the help of the villagers, it's the tale of one place through the whole of our history.
00:28We've been delving into their attics, prying into their medieval tax records, and we've
00:33even traced their family trees.
00:37And now we're going to take the tale on from the Tudors to the Industrial Revolution, from
00:43the Civil War to the British Empire.
00:47But for the people of Kibworth, history still starts and ends in the village.
00:54Together at home, profound changes in the village and the organisation of the fields
00:59lead to the end of the old communally organised farming society, most of whose people from
01:05now on will be wage-earning, landless workers.
01:12It's another step on the way to them becoming us.
01:24It's another step on the way to them becoming us.
01:51In the 1530s, seeking to divorce his queen so he could marry Anne Boleyn, King Henry
02:04VIII broke with the Church of Rome and made himself head of a new Church of England.
02:11That split in the end would turn England into a Protestant country.
02:15And in Kibworth, the villagers were now ordered to erase their Catholic past.
02:21In September 1538, the vicar of Kibworth, William Pearson, addressed his parishioners
02:26standing here in the church, told them about the new hard-line reforms from King Henry
02:32VIII's government.
02:33There was going to be a new English Bible.
02:35There had to be a list maintained of all births, deaths and marriages to keep tabs on conformity.
02:43And the laity would be tested on their faith regularly to avoid the detestable sin of idolatry
02:51Statues like the beloved Virgin of Kibworth over there had to go.
02:57And so did the great crucifix, the painted wooden image of our Lord above the arch in
03:03the nave.
03:06After the meeting, there was much discussion in the church and the vicar let his feelings
03:11be known.
03:13According to an informer, he spake devilishly and said that had King Henry died seven years
03:19ago, it had been no hurt.
03:23Now to wish King Henry VIII dead was not a wise move given his attitude to dissent.
03:30The vicar was thrown into jail and it was the beginning of the end for the old religion
03:36here in Kibworth.
03:40Over the next 20 years, the government forced four changes of religion onto the villagers.
03:46First with Henry who kept some Catholic customs, then his son Edward who was a hardline Protestant,
03:53then back to Catholicism under Queen Mary, and finally Henry's Protestant daughter Elizabeth
03:58I.
04:04For many English people, the Reformation caused a huge psychological wound, but of course
04:09life had to go on.
04:12In the three villages of our parish, Kibworth Harcourt, Kibworth Beecham and Smeaton Westerby,
04:18life still revolved around the old cycle of the agricultural year and the open fields.
04:27And we can get an insight into their lives during the Reformation from some of the 20,000
04:32Tudor wills in the local record office, with intimate details of home, family and friends.
04:39Among them, old Kibworth families.
04:42The Poles.
04:43The Poles, yeah.
04:44That's his own name, it's actually almost illegible.
04:47Here at the very start of the Reformation is John Pole.
04:51I bequeath my soul to God Almighty, Our Lady St Mary, and to all the holy company of heaven,
04:59the saints and so on.
05:00So this is a very Catholic formula.
05:03The Reformation is going on but he doesn't know much about it.
05:07And he leaves money for a trentle, that is for 30 masses to be said to save his soul.
05:16So he's very much a Catholic and he's very anxious to spend some of his money on his
05:23own safety, if you like.
05:26John was a typical old country Catholic, but he's also a rising yeoman farmer.
05:34He gives to his brother Thomas Pole a gown and a noble.
05:40Noble is a gold coin, it's worth six shillings an apron, so it's quite a valuable gold coin.
05:46And he leaves a U and a lamb.
05:49Look, he spells U-Y-O-O, a wonderful phonetic spelling.
05:55So John had done well.
05:57His farmhouse leased from his landlord, Merton College, Oxford, but over the years he'd bought
06:02more land for cash.
06:05Two yard land, 48 acres of land, which by the standards of the time is a substantial
06:11amount of land.
06:12So you can see immediately he's got the money to buy and he's got land and he has the ambition
06:18to acquire land, which he can then hand on to a son who is not due to inherit.
06:27They're becoming better off, they're becoming more independent.
06:31They see themselves as inhabitants of a village, not as the tenants of a law.
06:38So under the surface of the great national events, the villagers were quietly improving
06:43their material lives.
06:47Early in Elizabeth's reign, John Iliff made his will.
06:51An old Catholic, now a conforming Protestant, the big thing on John's mind was his house
06:57and his property.
06:59John Iliff, husbandman.
07:02John's a husbandman, that's a smallholder, but he's got possessions in every room.
07:09A group of local neighbours would gather to hear their names, you see William Clark and
07:14Michael Coxon and so on.
07:16They would go to the house and they would go round the house making a valuation of all
07:22his possessions.
07:23They start in the hall, which incidentally they spell H-A-U-L-E, and it has the standard
07:29furnishings of a table and two forms, two chairs and so on.
07:34It then goes on to say two pots, two pans and so on.
07:38We're almost at the beginning of the English living room.
07:42Any sense of luxuries?
07:44What were English farmers in the 16th century buying for themselves?
07:48They were not big spenders on their furniture, you know.
07:51I mean, the valuations they put on the two chairs and a cupboard and so on is three
07:58shillings, not big money.
08:02Bit of luxury perhaps in their bedding, the coverlets and so on.
08:07But they're not yet quite like us.
08:10Private bedrooms are still only for the rich.
08:13Did we have separate bedrooms by this stage?
08:16No, no.
08:17You have a chamber, so you do have the beginnings of an upstairs room, but in fact what they
08:21used that for is to store wool.
08:23It's not a living room at all, it's just a storage room.
08:31The Tudor Reformation would haunt England for a long time.
08:36It undermined people's most intimate feelings about life, work and the natural world.
08:43About ancestors, about death and the soul.
08:50With its Lollard past, maybe Kibworth was more receptive to the new faith than most
08:55places, but for many, the loss of their old world left heartache.
09:02In the summer of 1580, Elizabeth Clark made her will.
09:06An old Catholic, she now makes a resolutely Protestant statement of faith.
09:11I, Elizabeth Clark of Kibworth Beecham, on the 1st of June in the year of our Lord, 1580,
09:18and the 22nd of the Queen's reign, being of sound and perfect memory, make this my
09:23last will and testament.
09:25First, I bequeath my soul into the tuition of Jesus Christ, my creator and redeemer,
09:32and my body to be buried...
09:33But her biggest care is for family and friends.
09:37I give to the poor man's box 12 pence.
09:40I bequeath to Agnes, my daughter, 46 shillings and 8 pence, and 20 shillings that was her
09:47late sister's part, to be paid unto her at the day of her marriage.
09:53Elizabeth's will marks a silent revolution which took place over about 40 years in Tudor
09:59Kibworth.
10:02Elizabeth Clark was buried here in the churchyard at Kibworth, in the Beecham half, towards
10:08mid-summer 1580.
10:11It would have been a sober affair, the Protestant clergymen all in black, no incense and requiem
10:17and masses, no tolling of the great bell, not even the throwing of flowers on the grave.
10:24And with that, a line was drawn under nearly 1,000 years of traditional English Christianity.
10:31But what comes out most strongly in Elizabeth's last words in her testament are the old imperatives
10:38of a farming community, the importance of land, family and inheritance, the attachment
10:46to neighbours and their children, and care for the poor.
10:51The topography of the soul and of salvation may have shifted, but that of the village
10:56community had come out even more solid.
11:06And Kibworth, towards 1600, was a village community no longer of peasants, but of yeoman
11:11farmers and husbandmen, bound to each other by their common duties in the open field.
11:19But life for ordinary people was still hard.
11:22The plague of 1604 killed 77 adults in Kibworth, and then there was the Great Freeze of 1607.
11:36For the first time now, we've got images of the village.
11:39From 1609, here are the village houses and plots with the names of the families.
11:48The male line of the Poles in the village since the 1200s has gone now, but the Parkers,
11:54the Eyelifts and the Colemans are still doing fine.
12:00And a few years later, still in the reign of King James I, here's a plan of the village.
12:06What will become the A6 is lined with well-built two-storied houses,
12:12all of them now showing the new sign of social status and domestic comfort, chimneys.
12:23And here on Main Street, you can still get an idea of the village in 1609.
12:27Medieval and Tudor houses, the skin of red Leicestershire brick.
12:32They would have been thatched then.
12:34And there are those chimneys.
12:36They're burning coal now, not wood.
12:38Coal brought by local hauliers on carts from the Derbyshire Coalfield.
12:43Everybody's got two fireplaces.
12:45The Rays have got eight.
12:49But the Reformation had bequeathed many bitter political and religious divisions.
12:55A perfect storm of discontent was brewing,
12:58which would now lead the nation and the village into civil war.
13:07The road to civil war really begins when the King dissolves Parliament in 1629.
13:13That's the start of what, even in Kibworth, became known as the Eleven Year Tyranny.
13:18The King was spending enormous sums of money on unpopular foreign wars
13:23and on the extravagance of the court in London.
13:27His taxes caused a fury in places like Kibworth.
13:32And by 1640, both sides, the Parliamentarians and the King,
13:36were preparing to raise armies.
13:44And as civil war loomed, Kibworth found itself literally on the front line.
13:49On the big dig, we found a first hint of the war right in the middle of the village.
13:54Sorry, I've got to go.
14:00Digging up the Jubilee Gardens here.
14:03Hello, good morning.
14:05What's this?
14:07It looks like a stamp.
14:09It's perfectly rounded.
14:11OK, take it over there. Better be safe than sorry.
14:14Is this something?
14:15That's a bowling.
14:17Yeah.
14:18That's awesome!
14:19And for once, what we found wasn't a surprise.
14:22What did you find, Tom?
14:24We've got a cannonball.
14:25That's what we think it is.
14:27Yeah, civil war.
14:28We knew that for a time during the war,
14:30the King's army had actually been billeted around the village.
14:33That's exactly what I would think it is.
14:35Civil war, you reckon? Yeah.
14:38On the eve of the war, the local gentry on both sides set out to raise armies
14:43and military musters were held in Kibworth itself.
14:46What we have here is the muster roll for the Leicestershire Militia
14:50from the Gartry 100 in 1639 or 1640.
14:54So this is the raising of troops locally in Leicestershire,
14:59in the Gartry 100, on the very eve of the civil war.
15:02That's right.
15:03Every now and again, the government would say,
15:05muster your militia, and that means that they all come together,
15:09they do training and drilling and things like that,
15:11but they're also counted to make sure that they are all present
15:15and correct and properly equipped.
15:18They passed muster.
15:20You've got Kibworth, isn't it? Yes, oh, yes.
15:22Where are we? Oh, yeah, here we go.
15:25There we are. Kibworth, Beecham and Kibworth, Harcourt.
15:28And you can see that each was sending four men,
15:30two musketeers from Beecham, one musketeer from Harcourt
15:35and two pikemen and three pikemen, respectively.
15:38Terrific.
15:39You've got from Kibworth, Beecham, you've got Matthias Wood,
15:42he's a musketeer, William Smith, corselet, pikeman,
15:46Richard Lenton, musketeer, John Wilkinson, corselet,
15:50and then from Harcourt, you've got Thomas Freeman, corselet,
15:54William Parker, musketeer, John Drake and Robert Parker,
15:58both pikemen.
15:59And what class of people are these drawn from?
16:01Are they volunteers or do you get volunteered by your village?
16:06I think that's nearer.
16:08The requirement was that the parish should send four men, say,
16:12and so long as it sent four men,
16:15officially, they didn't care.
16:17If they could find someone who was willing to go,
16:19then that was fine, but if not,
16:21what you have here is an English military force
16:25raised by conscription.
16:27In effect, I suspect they tended to be the poorer,
16:31perhaps the men dependent on the parish.
16:34And the parish would say,
16:35you get relief six months of the year,
16:38on return, off you go, you're a musketeer.
16:41And when it came to the Civil War starting,
16:43if you're on this list,
16:45did they come knocking on your door saying,
16:46you've got to join the King's Army now?
16:48Would these people have fought as pikemen and musketeers
16:51in the Civil War?
16:53They may well have done, but they didn't as militiamen,
16:57because, of course, both the King and Parliament
16:59summoned the militia.
17:01So, in effect, they trumped each other and that was that.
17:05What they really fought over was the militia's equipment.
17:09What they struggled over in Leicester
17:11was the gunpowder that the militia had
17:13and the muskets and the pikemen that the militia had.
17:21And if you want an idea of what it was like
17:23to have a Civil War army march into your village,
17:26ask the sealed knot.
17:30They're marching through Kibworth
17:32to one of their regular reenactments
17:34of the battle nearby at Naseby.
17:39Roundheads and Cavaliers, Cromwell's New Model Army,
17:42it's one of those moments in our history that we all recognise.
17:49Soldiers, right!
17:52We've reached the 17th century in the English Civil War
17:55and just as in earlier times,
17:57the villagers get swept up in the events of the national story
18:02before the Battle of Naseby,
18:03the Royalist armies camped here in Kibworth.
18:13There's about nearly 3,000 of us in the membership.
18:17As always in history, having an army in the village was no fun.
18:21You are very kind. Thank you very much.
18:23There were bitter complaints to Parliament
18:24about the looting of food and horses here in Kibworth.
18:29Leicestershire was a divided country
18:31and this village sits on the watershed between Nosley,
18:35which is five miles up the road, which was the Parliamentary House,
18:38and Wistow Hall, five miles up the other way,
18:40which was a Royalist house.
18:42Getting shot, the shot ring goes down.
18:44You then put more wadding on top...
18:46I think the engagement of the common man
18:49with the national political issues, even then, was quite pronounced.
18:53Mass politics is thought to be a 20th- and 21st-century phenomenon.
18:57It's not. It goes way back...
18:59GUNFIRE
19:02GUNFIRE CONTINUES
19:11On a main road south, the village was in an exposed position
19:15and was occupied at different times by armies from both sides.
19:19What happened here over the war years is revealed by the parish register,
19:23which suddenly stops being written at all.
19:261592. So this is the copied-up version.
19:30This is the neat version. This is the copied-up version.
19:32And several folios missing.
19:34May we go forward to the English Civil War?
19:39Later, in an apologetic note, the vicar explains why.
19:44Wow! Blank pages.
19:47Terrific.
19:48Know all men that the reason why little or nothing is registered
19:53from this year, 1641, until the year 1649,
19:58was the civil wars between King Charles and his Parliament,
20:02which put all into a confusion till then,
20:05and neither ministers nor people could quietly stay at home
20:10for one party or the other.
20:13Armies going to and fro.
20:15Armies going to and fro, and also, of course,
20:19whether the clergyman fitted in with who was in control or not.
20:23Of course. Yes, yes. For one party or the other.
20:26You know, you're out.
20:29Dangerous times, but politically dangerous,
20:32and religious dangerous, too.
20:35So it may well be you couldn't find the vicar.
20:40Early in the war, the village had a royalist vicar.
20:43Later, they had a hard-line Puritan,
20:45who marched off with the parliamentary forces,
20:48arm in arm with the Protestant fundamentalists.
20:521644, um, 45, Battle of Naseby, 46.
20:57Still nothing happening, is there?
20:59Let's just move on.
21:01Of course, still blank sheets.
21:05The king married a Catholic, and this is a Protestant country.
21:09If our monarch marries a Catholic, where will that take us?
21:13Surely it is to convert the rest of the country,
21:15to follow their ways.
21:16It's potpourri, isn't it? Potpourri.
21:20Such opinions drove many Protestants in the parliamentary army,
21:24but it was a living.
21:26Sixpence a day is quite a goodly wage.
21:43The decisive battle was fought just south of Kibworth, at Naseby,
21:47in summer 1645.
21:50The king's forces were smashed by Parliament's army,
21:53commanded by Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell.
21:57The defeated royalists streamed north through Kibworth,
22:00leaving their dead scattered along the street.
22:03For the king, the war was lost.
22:11Within a year, King Charles surrendered,
22:13and Parliament put him on trial,
22:15and found him guilty of treason against the Commonwealth of England.
22:20The execution of King Charles here in front of the Banqueting Hall
22:24in Whitehall in January 1649
22:27led to an explosion of radical groups in England,
22:31but it also opened the floodgates to religious dissenters,
22:35a great movement of independents and Presbyterians
22:39and Baptists and Quakers
22:41who'd been fighting for their religious rights for a long time,
22:45who now saw their chance to take on the state itself.
22:48And in their wake was a tide of smaller groups,
22:51some of whom were very strange indeed.
22:53Sir, you are welcome, sir.
22:55Common people like you would have been not allowed in this building,
22:58but now that King Charles is dead, all common people may go inside,
23:01yourself included.
23:03Great to see you again. And you.
23:05Great events, though, weren't they?
23:07I mean, I got a thrill coming down Whitehall and seeing this.
23:11I mean, execution of Charles...
23:13It was the greatest movement that happened in the light of day ever in Christian Europe,
23:16and you can imagine what that meant to people at the time.
23:18Shockwaves.
23:20Now, the aftermath of all this,
23:22all these amazing groups kind of come out, don't they?
23:25You mean the religious types? Oh, yes.
23:27Ah, yes, yes. The Adamites, the Fumilirists,
23:30the Fifth Monarchy men, all these crazy people
23:33believing that women could preach in an open grove
23:35instead of having to go to a church.
23:37Nudists, vegetarians. Yes.
23:39What was the world coming to?
23:41Of course, Cromwell had to put a stop to all this,
23:43because otherwise, once you challenge authority,
23:45that challenges Cromwell's authority.
23:47So they let the genie out of the bag, did they?
23:49They did, rather, and put it straight back in again.
23:54Parliament had fought the war for a political cause,
23:57but now religion began to take over.
23:59Radical groups who wanted to dethrone the Church of England
24:03from its position of authority.
24:05These religious rebels became known as dissenters,
24:08or non-conformists.
24:12It's easy to forget how important religious dissent
24:15has been in our history.
24:17Many of the liberties we take for granted today
24:19were gained by dissenters,
24:21but at the time, the government saw such groups as a real threat.
24:25Even the Quakers.
24:28This is a copy of an order received in December 1668,
24:32and it's been copied into the book.
24:34It's addressed to Lieutenant Bale
24:36and the rest of the other commissioned officers
24:38in the militia troop of Captain George Faunt,
24:40who lived at Foston,
24:42which is, you know, an easy day's ride.
24:44Less than that, really, from Kibworth.
24:46And it says that there are great numbers
24:50of persons commonly called Quakers
24:52that assemble and meet together
24:55under the pretense of joining in a religious worship
24:58at Smeaton in the parish of Kibworth
25:00and diverse other places.
25:02And it orders Lieutenant Bale to gather his troops together
25:05and to go and arrest or disperse them.
25:08So, you know, this is quite remarkable, isn't it?
25:11So, they're Quakers, they're a threat,
25:14and it says that they're joining under the pretense of religious worship.
25:20So they're not even accepting
25:22that they are actually carrying out genuine religious worship.
25:26Today, we don't associate Quakers
25:29with the kind of violent assemblies and sedition
25:31and threats to the state, do we?
25:33Certainly not.
25:35And now Kibworth itself became a centre for dissenting groups.
25:40They got a legal place of worship in 1672,
25:43when government spies reported nearly 200 people of the middling sort
25:48from Kibworth and other villages,
25:50and they would be a major presence in Kibworth until today.
25:57These groups were fighting for freedoms we take for granted now,
26:00freedom of speech, freedom of worship.
26:04In this time of religious and political turmoil in the late 1600s,
26:08we get the first national and local newspapers.
26:13And education was a particular focus for the dissenters,
26:17who saw that knowledge was power.
26:20After the Restoration Act in 1660,
26:23Kibworth became a centre for people who expressed different opinions.
26:27One person was Reverend John Jennings,
26:31and he lived at West Langton Hall, running a church for dissenters there.
26:36And as they grew, they went to the stables,
26:41which was behind the White House,
26:43once known as the Old Crown Inn, in Kibworth Harcourt.
26:48And the White House is still here.
26:50Later a pub, the dissenters' first meeting place is a private house today.
26:55So this is the main road before the building of the Turnpike
26:59and the modern A6, isn't it?
27:02With coaching inns all along it.
27:04We're sitting here now behind the Old Crown Inn.
27:0951 and 53 Gloucester Road at present.
27:13Now known as the White House.
27:15And, of course, at one point it was completely white.
27:18We're looking for the non-conformists
27:21who were so important to Kibworth in the 17th century.
27:24And all the old accounts say that the very first place of worship
27:28which they leased out was in a stable or a building
27:32behind what was later the Old Crown Inn.
27:35They talk about some sort of stable buildings or something like that?
27:38The stable on the loft was just behind us there.
27:42There used to be more sticking out here, didn't there?
27:45It used to go much further back there.
27:47Do we know how big the congregation was in those days, John?
27:50I think it was right about 150, initially.
27:55I read somewhere as well that there was nobody of any note
27:58in the congregation, which is quite strange.
28:01So everybody was either keeping a low profile about it...
28:04Ordinary Kibworth people, presumably.
28:06Just ordinary farm workers' houses being used for the gatherings.
28:09Until, of course, they were destroyed by fire.
28:12And at that point they decided they would build a congregational chapel,
28:18which was paid for by public subscription.
28:22One of the dissenters' biggest complaints
28:24was that they were denied a proper education
28:27as they were barred from university.
28:29So here in Kibworth, they decided to provide a top-quality
28:33higher education for their community.
28:36A dissenting academy.
28:38An alternative university.
28:41Great thought, isn't it?
28:43Kibworth constantly surprises.
28:45The Academy of Kibworth, and it had a national fame, didn't it,
28:48in the 18th century.
28:50We always know that Kibworth is important,
28:52but you don't actually realise how much it has had an impact
28:56on learning and other things that are going on in the country.
28:59It's almost in opposition to Oxford and Cambridge, isn't it?
29:02It's a sort of dissenters aren't allowed to go to Oxford and Cambridge
29:06because they won't do the appropriate oaths and all that sort of stuff,
29:10and the allegiance to the church.
29:12So they can't go.
29:14So they set up an academy here.
29:16And what's amazing about it,
29:18I don't know whether you've had a look at it,
29:20but the curriculum was amazing.
29:22I mean, you could do Greek, Latin, Italian, French,
29:26geography, they did science.
29:28And one extraordinary product of the academy,
29:31who's only now been rediscovered,
29:33was the daughter of one of the teachers, Anna Letitia Barbeau,
29:38born Anna Aitken in Kibworth in 1743,
29:41a woman who understood that our political and religious freedoms
29:45depend on education.
29:49This is another fable called The Young Mouse.
29:52A young mouse lived in a cupboard where sweetmeats were kept.
29:56She dined every day upon biscuit, marmalade or fine sugar.
30:00Never had any little mouse lived so well.
30:07Poet, anti-slavery and anti-war agitator,
30:10Anna was also a pioneering writer of children's books.
30:15Charles, what are eyes for?
30:17Seeing!
30:19What are ears for? Hearing!
30:22What is the tongue for? Smoking!
30:25What are teeth for? Eating!
30:28What is the nose for? Smelling!
30:31And what are legs for? Walking!
30:35Then do not make Mama carry you, walk yourself.
30:39She begged her father to be taught Latin and a little Greek,
30:44which was very unusual in those days, and reluctantly he agreed,
30:48but her mother was very upset because she thought
30:51that it would make her not a marriageable prospect.
30:54What, very Latin and Greek?
30:56Yes, she would be too clever.
30:58But, in fact, that wasn't true.
31:00She did have a number of proposals in the end,
31:03despite her intellect.
31:05Men seemed to have fallen in love with her by the sound of it.
31:08Yes, exactly, including possibly the French revolutionary Jean Marat,
31:13who was later on killed in his bath by a woman.
31:18But he spent some time in the academy.
31:26She starts off as a poet and is, it seems,
31:30She starts off as a poet and is, it seems,
31:33every librarian in the country had a copy of these poems.
31:37She also went on to write against the injustices of the age,
31:42the fact that she is a dissenter
31:44and that part of the community of dissenters
31:47didn't have proper civil rights.
31:54But then she said that it was one of the most impressive things
31:57that a person could do is to lay the foundations of the future
32:01in a child's mind.
32:03On the country are very troublesome and mischievous.
32:06She really revolutionised how children's literature should be presented.
32:11In the methods that she used,
32:14quite a lot of her work is dialogic,
32:17so the child and the mother, usually it's the mother,
32:21talk to each other and explore the world
32:26in a language which is very clear and plain
32:30and is designed to make the child think.
32:36She's a real hero and in Kibworth no longer forgotten.
32:40Possessed of great beauty,
32:42distinct traces of which she retained to the latest of her life.
32:45Her person was slender, her complexion exquisitely fair,
32:48with the bloom of perfect health.
32:50Her features regular and elegant and her dark blue eyes beamed
32:54with a light of wit and fancy.
32:56I wonder if anyone has described me like that?
32:59My husband does all the time to his friends.
33:03Charismatic woman, then.
33:05Absolutely.
33:06The combination of the beauty and the actual education
33:09that made her this kind of drawcard.
33:16Ideas change us. They're the motor of progress.
33:20And in the 18th century,
33:21Kibworth opened up to the world in other ways, too.
33:24The turnpike from London to Leicester was run through the village,
33:28a specially surfaced toll road.
33:31The village became a stop on the route north
33:33and 24 coaches a day were fed and watered in its coaching inns.
33:38If you look at the little fragments that are coming up...
33:41And in the big dig, we found their traces.
33:44The exception is chamber pots.
33:46We've got a couple of rims from chamber pots.
33:48We're also getting quite a bit of oyster shell.
33:50I just wonder if we've got a pub round here sometime
33:52between about 1618, 1750.
33:54At Kibworth, of course, you've got a huge number of inns
33:57over the 1700s, 17th, 18th century
34:00because of the road to Market Harbour and to London.
34:08That clay pipe is not Victorian, it's older.
34:10If you look at the shape of the bowl,
34:12that's an 18th-century clay pipe, maybe 17th-century.
34:15It's actually all along Main Street.
34:17It looks as if there were coaching inns
34:19with their big coach entry doors, doesn't it?
34:22It's very obviously an awful lot of pottery being trashed
34:25and that's all the way along here,
34:27so that's the sort of thing you'd expect to see in an inn.
34:30So it's coaching inns nine miles south of Leicester,
34:33a lot of people stopping here.
34:35I mean, rumours that there were other entertainments on offer
34:38besides drinking food.
34:41So the big dig had come up Trump's once again.
34:44I found a human finger bone.
34:46You found a human finger bone? Yeah.
34:48God, some poor old person lost their finger on a trip to shops.
34:52That's absolutely terrible.
34:58The finds from the big dig suggested that by the 1700s,
35:02England's population had recovered to the level it had
35:05before the Black Death.
35:07This does seem to be quite indicative of real growth
35:10and, of course, some of the other finds as well
35:12are telling us the same story.
35:14The mid-Tudor period, 1550, maybe three million,
35:19is doubled by 1700, isn't it?
35:21And you can see it in there.
35:26But a revolution in agriculture
35:28was now bringing a huge increase in productivity.
35:32The old communal medieval strip system was no longer economic,
35:37too labour-intensive.
35:39In the landlord's archive in Merton College, Oxford,
35:43this map of the open fields was about to be rolled away forever.
35:48Topographical description and a brief relation
35:52of the manner of Kibberth Harcourt in the county of Leicester.
35:56And still presumably working as an open field.
35:59The big local landowners wanted to scrap the open fields,
36:03consolidate their holdings into larger economic units.
36:07The money was now in grazing and sheep and wool.
36:10The strip fields had had their day.
36:12These are the ridges and furrows left by the medieval plough teams
36:16all those centuries ago, just going up and down this hillside.
36:21On 21st April 1779, at the Old Crown Inn,
36:26a meeting was held where local landowners,
36:29led by the Hames, the Foxtons, the Humphreys,
36:32voted for the enclosure of the common fields,
36:35which was duly ratified by act of Parliament.
36:42It was the great national robbery,
36:44when the common lands were filched from the poor,
36:47whose heritage they were,
36:49and apportioned among the surrounding landowners.
36:52Rank robbery.
36:56So all around us, the post-enclosure landscape of Kibberth.
37:01Green pasture and sheep grazing everywhere.
37:04But at our feet, the ridge and furrow left by the medieval ploughmen.
37:10The deep bone structure of their world.
37:20The enclosures of the 18th century
37:22were a turning point in the story of the village,
37:24as they were for communities all over England.
37:28Nearly 900-year tradition of communal labour
37:32out in these field strips,
37:34every one of which had its own name.
37:36These hills sick, the Blacklands, Banwell furlong.
37:42The old mental map of the village, gone forever.
37:50This massive social and economic change
37:53has long been seen as marking the transition
37:56from feudalism to capitalism.
37:59Does that make any sense to you?
38:01And what do we mean by that when we talk about these things?
38:04The fact that the village, dated as it is,
38:07still encapsulates the very real changes that are going on.
38:13The decline of the peasantry, the rise of the farmer,
38:16the decline of the community, the rise of the individual.
38:20You know, the end of the open fields
38:23and the development of the enclosures,
38:26the production, partly at least,
38:29for the consumption of your own household,
38:32and now increasingly entirely for the market,
38:35specialising for the market.
38:37I mean, these are big changes in the way which people behave,
38:41and that is, can be summed up by that phrase,
38:44moving from feudalism to capitalism.
38:49Inevitably, the biggest losers in the enclosures were the poor.
38:53Compensation was often minimal.
38:55Many were forced out of work and some into crime.
38:59First of all, welcome.
39:02I can't believe... I can't believe that we've met up.
39:05Jean and Neil Beasley have come all the way from Australia
39:08to try to find out about their Kibworth ancestor, Charles Beasley.
39:13He was a highwayman condemned to death back in 1793.
39:17And one of them was Charles Beasley from Kibberth Beecham,
39:21and here we are.
39:23Now, you're Beasley's, yeah?
39:25Yes, direct bloodline.
39:27Fantastic, and you're the researcher, are you?
39:30I'm the researcher.
39:33Great stuff.
39:34Born in Kibberth, comes from a big family, do we know?
39:37It was a big family.
39:40I had about seven children, but Pat has informed me that it was 12.
39:45There were 12 children, but five of them died.
39:48Yes.
39:49This is the actual register, so...
39:52Fantastic.
39:54This is Charles's baptism.
40:00This is the page for the christenings of 1776.
40:04And there we are.
40:06Charles William Beasley.
40:08Well, it's spelled Beasley. There are a lot of spellings.
40:11Can we read it?
40:12We quite understand that a lot of them couldn't read or write.
40:16Charles William Beasley, son of Henry and Susannah Beasley,
40:20born December 6th,
40:23baptised December 19th, 1776.
40:28I'm holding the book.
40:31Beasley, it turned out, was a teenage tearaway,
40:34the son of unemployed framework knitters.
40:37We knew that he'd been in trouble with the law
40:39and that he'd robbed a stagecoach
40:41and also that he had robbed a shop,
40:45but we didn't know he belonged to a gang.
40:47The trial was in the Old Bailey, wasn't it?
40:49Yes.
40:50And the Old Bailey...
40:51And with the help of the National Archive,
40:53we found the transcript of the trial.
40:55This is Driscoll, who's one of the ones who's going to be executed here.
40:59On the day of the robbery, Beasley, Rabbits and I...
41:03It sounds like a Roald Dahl story, doesn't it?
41:07They purchased a pair of pistols.
41:09John Rabbits and Charles Beasley were indicted for feloniously
41:13making an assault on the King's Highway on James Sayre
41:16on the 11th of July.
41:18And lo and behold, there's the full transcript here
41:22with the eyewitnesses.
41:24A little man jumped into the chairs with the pistol in his hand.
41:28And he said,
41:29''Damn your eyes, your money, or I'll blow your bloody eyes out!''
41:35And I said,
41:36''I don't know what the matter is, but take that thing away from my head
41:39''and I'll give you my money!''
41:41So I put my hand into my pocket and gave him two and a half guineas.
41:44And he stepped back on the step of the chairs and he looked at it and he said,
41:47''Damn your eyes, you've got more money than this about you!''
41:50And he stepped back out.
41:51And I said,
41:52''You damn rascal, shut the door after you, after taking my money.
41:56''I will have you if I never have another!''
41:59And I immediately jumped out of the chairs and called out,
42:02''Stop thief!''
42:03And people came out of the Rosencrantz public house and pursued them.
42:06And they get him.
42:08And the verdict, Charles Beasley, guilty. Death.
42:12Spared because he was only 16,
42:14Beasley was transported to Australia, to a new life,
42:17and the beginning of the story of a new nation.
42:20Here we are, trying to pursue the sort of, you know,
42:23the heart of the English story, the quintessential English story,
42:27and suddenly our village broadens out to being the Australian story.
42:32If they'd hung him, he wouldn't have been here.
42:35I know. It's an amazing tale, isn't it?
42:38It's more than we'd hoped to find.
42:41Much more. Much, much more.
42:45And...
42:47..emotionally, it'll probably take a while to...
42:53..to leave, I think.
42:56MUSIC PLAYS
43:05So, with feminists and highwaymen,
43:0718th-century Kibworth was full of surprises.
43:10But it was the canals that really opened the village to the world.
43:14The Grand Union Canal was dug along the southern edge of Kibworth Parish
43:18during the 1790s.
43:21This is the coming of a new age, this.
43:24This is the industrial revolution coming into the countryside of Kibworth.
43:31Close by, Foxton Locks is one of the engineering feats of the age,
43:35at the junction of what was then Britain's newest transport system.
43:40They're no longer carrying heavy goods today,
43:43but the canals are as busy as ever.
43:49So, the villages of Kibworth, which is there, isn't it?
43:52Yes, that's there.
43:53The coal for their fires would be unloaded.
43:56And the canals would be...
43:58..the canals would be used to transport the coal.
44:01So, the villages of Kibworth, which is there, isn't it?
44:04Yes, that's there.
44:05The coal for their fires would be unloaded.
44:07The coal for their fires would be unloaded here off the boats.
44:11There's a lot of timber from there.
44:13Ah, you're right.
44:15Amazing to think, isn't it?
44:17Kind of pre-motorways and pre-train.
44:19That was the main sort of way of getting round and everything.
44:22Could you go down to London from here?
44:24If you wanted to.
44:25Foxton Locks, and then you go down to the Grand Union,
44:29through Rugby, and then down to London.
44:32Down the Oxford.
44:34Tremendous.
44:35So, where next?
44:36Where next? We're going down to the River Severn, aren't we?
44:38Going on the Avon and the Severn next, down to Tewkesbury.
44:41A couple of weeks' time.
44:42We've got a party down there.
44:43Chop down the river there.
44:52It improved transport so much.
44:54Before the canals arrived, if you wanted coal delivering,
44:58if it didn't arrive before September,
45:00you probably wasn't going to get there.
45:03The roads would just disappear in the mud.
45:07A horse pulling a narrowboat full of coal can shift 25 tonnes.
45:13Same horse on the road is going to be struggling to pull a tonne.
45:18Cut the cost of coal by half.
45:21But not only that, they could then get their own goods out,
45:24because everything you can imagine went by boat.
45:28And there is even records of a boatload of bulldogs
45:32going to the Leicester show.
45:36So the canals were a crucial catalyst
45:38in the rise of industrial England.
45:42The canals and the turnpikes brought about
45:44a revolution in transport in England,
45:46maybe the biggest since the Roman roads.
45:49For now, even a rural village like Kibworth
45:51was connected to a national transport network
45:54and, beyond that, to a global trading system,
45:57as the British Empire spread its power across the world.
46:03Tom Gamble of Kibworth was on the fighting Temeraire at Trafalgar.
46:09Rob Shaw fought with Wellington.
46:14Rob Fletcher signed up for the East India Company
46:17and did 20 years in the plains of Hindustan.
46:21And back in Kibworth on the village history day,
46:24among the Roman brooches and Anglo-Saxon coins
46:27brought in by local metal detectorists,
46:30there was even a hat badge from the 1820s in India.
46:33We've got Hindustan.
46:35That old-fashioned spelling goes onto a U.
46:38But many people also brought in memorabilia from the industry
46:42which from now on will dominate their village.
46:45A famous garage.
46:46I've heard stories from more than one village.
46:49I've heard stories from more than one people.
46:51Oh, you should have seen Bert's garage, wouldn't you?
46:56I don't believe it. A vampire jet in the garage.
46:59No, not that one, but this.
47:01The framework knitting industry.
47:03This was a big industry in this part of the world.
47:05It was partly local history,
47:07but he was a sales director for a knitting machine.
47:09Local engineer and history enthusiast Bert Aggers
47:12saved many old machines.
47:14Taking all these things apart, putting them back together again,
47:17making them work.
47:21This is just amazing here, isn't it?
47:23That's one of the original old machines, isn't it,
47:26from the 19th century.
47:29Framework knitting was a major industry in the East Midlands
47:33from around 1700 till the 1950s.
47:36Making hosiery, clothes and gloves,
47:38it employed half a million people.
47:40Nice and gently.
47:42This is the old factory near Kibworth at Wigston.
47:45This is the workshop which was built in 1890.
47:51Come on, then, gang. All go in.
47:53At its height, there were 100,000 machines across the East Midlands
47:57in homes and factories like this.
48:02Closed down and locked up in the 1950s,
48:05the factory is literally stopped in time.
48:08So this is the workshop
48:10where the men would work 12 hours a day
48:13if work was available.
48:15These frames are 200, 300 years old.
48:18We're not quite sure.
48:19They've been re-cobbled time and time again.
48:22And this is a winding machine
48:24which winds bobbin of yarn
48:27from the hank onto the cone.
48:30Miss, would you like to come here?
48:33If you put your hand on there
48:35and turn it round, you'll have to reach up.
48:38Can you see, in the arms of the bobbin,
48:41there was no tension.
48:44Again, adding to the noise of the place.
48:48Righto, Miss, look.
48:50Otherwise, I've got to spend all afternoon winding it back around.
48:54I don't know what I'm going to do.
48:56Initially, these frames would have been in your kitchen in Kibworth.
49:00But Master Ozier, who owned the house,
49:02brought all the frames into here
49:04so he got control over the workforce and the yarn.
49:08Did they have to do it on the weekends as well?
49:11No, they didn't work on Sundays.
49:13What did they, like, make on these machines?
49:16Gloves, which was a highly specialised job.
49:22And with a glove like that, there's your cuff,
49:25there's your palm and there is your thumb.
49:28And what kind of people worked here?
49:30Like, how old were they?
49:32The children in the family would come here as apprentices
49:36or go somewhere to learn it.
49:38And we know, to learn to be an apprentice,
49:41they would stand here watching the man operate the frame
49:46and it was a seven-year apprenticeship
49:48to become a fully acquired framework knitter.
49:51There is instances, I don't believe it,
49:53where they chained somebody so he didn't get away.
50:01It was repetitive work that demanded fierce concentration.
50:05Would you like to sit on here and have a go, sir?
50:08OK.
50:09Come on, George Henry.
50:11Do you want one?
50:13Can you do it, Milda?
50:16Now, don't lose any fingers, though, will you?
50:19Can you reach the hands on here and press those in?
50:23Pull this forward. Right.
50:26But in places like Kibworth,
50:28it was often the only work available for landless workers...
50:31Well done!
50:33..whose families were long-term unemployed
50:36in the decades after the enclosures.
50:38Take your foot off and bring it forward.
50:41Look here, look at all the stitches you dropped. Look here.
50:44You'd soon be out the door and on the dole.
50:53Nice and even, like that end.
50:57A later invention was the Griswold.
50:59Small and moveable, you could use it in your living room.
51:02So simple, even a child could do it.
51:05With your own Griswold, in hock to the owners,
51:08you really could end up chained to your machine.
51:23In Kibworth Beecham and Smeaton,
51:25frame knitting became the main employer.
51:28Many families worked together at home.
51:31And with Nicky and Bob Tully and their children,
51:34we discovered the story of one family of framework knitters
51:37who'd lived in their house 170 years before.
51:41We've lived here 25 years now.
51:44The terrace itself was originally a workhouse, we believe,
51:47circa 1770, something like that.
51:50And then in the 1800s, it was turned into private dwellings.
51:54And I think if you see the different-coloured brick up there,
51:57that actually says Smeaton Terrace.
51:59You can actually see the letter A just above the right-hand edge of the window frame.
52:03Yes, absolutely.
52:05From deduction, you can tell that the floors are sort of concrete or equivalent.
52:09I don't know where the concrete was about in 1770.
52:12But there's a layer of concrete, and then the straw layer underneath.
52:16So it was obviously built for something substantial.
52:19It's most likely that the tenants of the houses,
52:23when it was sold in 1836, were framework knitters.
52:27And that would explain for the floor being strengthened.
52:29It also explained the windows, because they needed an awful lot of light.
52:32I mean, just before I came up, I did a little trawl in the National Archive.
52:38And it's a bit difficult to read.
52:40I'm trying to have a look at that, Nicky.
52:42It's the parish of...
52:44You can see it's the parish of Smeaton-Westerby
52:47selling off a building that was owned by the parish.
52:50So presumably, the workhouse up to that point.
52:54It's got a series of people, Robert Eyeliffe, John Johnson,
52:58Job Johnson and others, who were framework knitters
53:02or worked seamers of stockings and this kind of stuff.
53:06I mean, Job Johnson must have been...
53:08If he was 42 in the 1851 census, then he's in his 20s at that time.
53:13They've all got families clearly working with them, I think.
53:17Initially, it was a very good way of making a living.
53:20A lot of people were attracted to this area and expanded and expanded.
53:24But gradually, as the markets contracted,
53:26still more people were going in, so there was great overproduction
53:29and the living standards began to fall very badly.
53:32So that by the 1840s, framework knitters were in terrible straits.
53:37And in 1843, 25,000 framework knitters from Leicestershire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire
53:41petitioned Parliament saying,
53:43we want a commission to regulate wages and regulate in disputes.
53:47So we've got this report where they recorded all the witness statements
53:51and it's a sort of vignette into what's happening to the industry at that time.
53:54And the nice thing is, we've got two witnesses from Sweden and West Spain
53:58and one of them is Job Johnson, who we know...
54:00Fantastic, from this territory.
54:02And it's a family business, is that right?
54:04Well, this was the big problem, yes.
54:06I mean, Bob would be at the machine.
54:08Yes.
54:09Nicky would be...
54:10You'd be doing the seaming and you'd be doing the winding.
54:13Ah. What would Charlie be doing?
54:15Oh, you'd be big enough to be at frame, I'm sorry.
54:17You'd be looking after your smaller brothers and sisters, wouldn't you?
54:20And the little girl puts in the frame at nine.
54:22I don't know, are you old enough?
54:24Are we?
54:25So this is your terrace in the 1840s.
54:29Job Johnson.
54:31I'm Job Johnson of Smeaton.
54:33I work 14 hours a day.
54:35I have to feed my wife, myself and five children.
54:39I have no money to send them to day school,
54:42for until this year I was paid in goods or tokens, not in money.
54:47He was nearly always paid in goods.
54:49Oh, yeah.
54:50Not cash.
54:51There were a number of problems oppressing the framework editors
54:54and one of them was track payments.
54:56A track payment is payments in goods or tokens
54:58that you could only use at your employer's shop.
55:00Oh.
55:01Instead of ready money.
55:02Just like in the Great Depression in America.
55:04Yeah.
55:05Yes, and it was actually made illegal in 1831.
55:08This is 1843, but no-one had told the framework editors.
55:11No, nobody spoke about the cheque.
55:13And they bitterly resented it
55:15because they were so open to exploitation by the employer.
55:17When they were being paid poor wages anyway, it was a real...
55:20Well, they talk about being a tyranny of oppression.
55:22It was a real problem.
55:23You were literally working to live.
55:25There was no spare.
55:27They were paying out their own expenses,
55:29the frame rent, carriage rent, seeming.
55:32As their wages fell so disastrously at the beginning of the 19th century,
55:36the framework actually went up.
55:38There are people in Kipworth who say they can't afford bread,
55:41so they're just eating potatoes four times a day.
55:43They can't afford bread?
55:44No.
55:45No.
55:53I am by trade a framework knitter and have a wife and one child.
55:58One child I have lately buried,
56:00and my wife is far advanced in pregnancy.
56:04I am reduced to the greatest distress
56:06and have no means to procure the common necessities of life.
56:13There is no race of people under the sun so depressed as we are
56:17who work the hours we do for the money we get.
56:21It would be my delight to bring my family up to a school.
56:25I cannot bear the thought of bringing up a family in ignorance,
56:29so as not to read a little.
56:31They've been bricked in, but you see what they were originally.
56:35And you can see the floor where it goes right down where the machines were
56:39and where their feet used to move.
56:41Oh, yeah. Oh, right, yeah.
56:43The voices of these poor stockiners, weavers and Luddites
56:47are only now being rescued from what one modern historian called
56:51the enormous condescension of posterity.
56:59But they weren't just victims of history.
57:02Like their medieval ancestors, they were also its makers.
57:06Out of their struggles in the early 19th century,
57:09in part inspired by non-conformity, a new England began to emerge.
57:16The peasants had become the working class
57:19and their time had come in English history.
57:22The education the framework knitters dreamed of would follow
57:26and with education would come representation.
57:29Copper plate handwriting.
57:32You are to do the A and the B and the C and so on.
57:44And the creation of a working class culture
57:47with sport, music, entertainment, humour,
57:50which is still the basis of our popular culture today.
57:54The theme of our next song, Miss Ellie McCann.
57:59And next, in the final chapter of the story,
58:02the Victorians, the World Wars and us.
58:05Gentlemen, good evening!
58:07Ooh!
58:21Not that I'm...
58:23Not that I'm...
58:25But...
58:27But...
58:29APPLAUSE
58:51You