The Story of England by Michael Wood (PDF)

Description

A VILLAGE AND ITS PEOPLE THROUGH THE WHOLE OF ENGLISH HISTORYThe village of Kibworth in Leicestershire lies at the very centre of England. It has a church, some pubs, the Grand Union Canal, a First World War Memorial – and many centuries of recorded history. Bought in the thirteenth century by William de Merton, who founded Merton College, Oxford, it also lodges 750 years of village history. Michael Wood tells the extraordinary story of one English community over fifteen centuries – from the moment that the Roman Emperor Honorius sent his famous letter in 410 advising the English to look to their own defences to the village as it is today. He builds on this unique archive, enlisting the help of Kibworth’s inhabitants in a village-wide archaeological dig and the first complete DNA profile of an English village.The story of Kibworth is the story of England itself, a Who Do You Think You Are? for the entire nation.’Better than any historian for decades, Wood brings home not just the ways in which buildings, landscapes and written texts may be read, but the sensual beauty of encounters with them’ TLS

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I purchased this book after watching Michael Wood’s BBC series called “The Story of England” on YouTube. I have enjoyed Michael Wood’s historical/cultural videos for many years, but this series was his best effort, in my opinion. The book was published as a companion to the series and it definitely supported and added special details that made me appreciate the work even more. I purchased the book used in good condition for a reasonable price. Thebook is worth the money and the time. Highly recommended.

⭐I slowly read this over the course of a year after watching the TV programme several times. I enjoy Michael Wood’s work and am fascinated by the project he set out to accomplish here. The only reason I’m not giving this book five stars is that it is very repetitive and you can tell that it was somewhat rushed. Wood even admits as much in his acknowledgements. But I have fallen in love with Kibworth and its history, so much so that I made a point to visit Kibworth Harcourt (however briefly) during my first trip in England in 2016 (see photo) and tracked down the mysterious ‘Munt’ using the map in the front of the book. My verdict: it’s good and worth your time, however some more polishing could have made this book truly great.

⭐I LIKE THE WRITER’S STYLE OF WRITING, AND I’M GLAD HE’S HAD SO MANY SUCCESSFUL BOOKS WITH SUCH A STYLE BECAUSE IT IS FACTUALLY INTENSE. I READ A LOT AND I PREFER BOOKS THAT GIVE ME A LOT OF FACTS. THERE WERE A NUMBER OF ERRORS IN THE TEXT AND INDEX THAT I FOUND, SO I DIDN’T RATE THE BOOK AS HIGH AS I MIGHT HAVE. ALSO, I FOUND FACTUAL ERRORS ON THE BROADER SCHEME OF THINGS. THE WRITER DID A GREAT JOB OF BEING ACCURATE WITH RESPECT TO THE SMALL TOWNS MAKING UP HIS STORY, BUT WAS UNABLE TO BE MORE ACCURATE IN TERMS OF THE LARGER PICTURE WHICH WOULD HAVE REQUIRED A DEEPER KNOWLEDGE OF ENGLISH HISTORY THAT THE WRITER SEEMS TO POSSESS.

⭐This is really a micro-history of one section of England, which Wood, as usual, tells in his inimitable way, through detailed research in original sources and one-the-ground views of the region and how it has changed. The book is much fuller on the medieval and earlier periods, and much less so on the modern era, but makes for fascinating reading. Nonetheless, it is not the “story of England,” but of a part of this surprisingly diverse country.

⭐Michael Wood’s The Story of England is an engaging way to make an otherwise dry subject with limited appeal come to life as he makes it very personal to the folks whose ancestors lived in the village area even before the Romans. Who wouldn’t want to know how their direct ancestors lived in the very patch of earth in which they now live? I’d recommend the reader view the PBS documentary based on this book.

⭐I was searching for good and beautiful material about England’s history. I found Michael Wood’s The Story of England – DVD and I bought it. l loved it so much that I decided to buy this book with the same name and author. The narrative in the DVD follows the writing of the book. It is a perfect aural reproduction. The book also has some black and white pictures.I recommend you buy both (book and DVD) if you are really interested in learning England’s history. Michael Wood is perfect in history issues.

⭐I enjoyed the book, and particularly the take on a single town through history. The Merton records are obviously key, but engaging the townfolk in digging pits is great.One big problem – in the book and in the show, they refer to text from the 1300’s that talks of planting and hauling around CORN?? How did corn get to 14th century England from the Americas??

⭐More than just history, this a story of survival and adaptation after centuries of invasion. There is a lesson to be learned here that a people can endure terrible hardships, including loss of freedom and dignity, and come out the better, and it doesn’t matter what religion or culture the invaders bring, the stronger character prevails in the end.

⭐A wonderful account of one village through the ages. Michael Wood is an accomplished historian and especially effective on TV; his History of China is sweeping history that amazes. Perhaps he is less effective in print however. As is often the case with TV history there is repetition and rhetoric. There are some gaps in this story and in particular the influence of ‘radicals’ during the Civil War; iconoclasm is described but the political debate slides by. The same is true of 19th Century radicalism especially the Chartists and later the rise of the Labour Party let alone the effects of Syndicalism and fascism in the early 20th C. The impression is given that the author doesn’t want to sully the tale with ‘modern’ politics which is a pity.

⭐I have two suggestions regarding the content: (1) a glossary explaining the many (50+) words which I think are unfamiliar to most readers (including me), and (2) more maps, showing the area in various historical periods and marking ALL the features mentioned in the text! Given both of those and sharp printing on good paper, I would gladly have paid twice the price. But after Michael Wood’s most interesting TV series, the book came as a disappointment.

⭐This is a review of the original hardback edition. There are seventeen chapters sandwiched between an introduction and an epilogue. The book’s halfway point, as with the accompanying TV series, is the thirteenth century, so Wood devotes much welcome time to the Dark Age, Anglo-Saxon, and medieval periods. There are thirty-nine plates and five maps.All the plates are monochrome, so we do not get fully to appreciate the “golden ironstone” of St Wilfrid’s church; the wide blue skies above the Gartree; or the colourful content of the medieval records. Alas, there is no sight in Wood’s volume of Harry the Hayward’s omen book – “the page for January has dark hooded figures spewing poisoned arrows”; there is no reproduction of the “two wonderful painted plans of 1609 and 1635 which depict all the village houses”; and none of the “beautiful map … of the open fields of Harcourt”, of which we catch glimpses in the TV series. Instead, the maps that are provided are poor, with many of the places mentioned in the text situated off the edges.In his introduction Wood argues that ostensibly anywhere in England could have been chosen for his experiment of focussing on the history of one settlement to tell the story of a nation, but the richness of the Merton College documents allied to an industrial and not just agricultural past led to Wood’s choice of Kibworth in Leicestershire. As Wood states in further support of his choice, as well as being geographically central, Kibworth nevertheless also lies “on a linguistic and cultural divide.”It is arguable whether Wood is right to state that, “The details of the [national] story will be different in each place, but it is the same story”, but the argument would be more over what’s missing from the Kibworth story rather than what it is in it. For instance, there was no local landowning abbey, so immediately there is a difference from the story of most other settlements in England. Moreover, Kibworth is close to Bosworth and Lutterworth, it experienced late enclosure of its open fields, and – perhaps, most importantly – it is so far from the sea. All of these (and more) make the juxtaposition of the Kibworth story and the English story problematical.Nevertheless, Wood writes how “the local history of every county, parish and village has been more intensely cultivated here than anywhere in the world: in the belief that every place is its own version of the grand narrative, that every place is also part of the national story.” He demonstrates this in the very first five pages of his own `grand narrative’, walking to, through, and out of Kibworth, noting with his quick eye everything from 4000-year-old burial sites to the Kibworth Fish Bar and the Moka Coffee Shop, with all periods between.As usual, the book of the TV series tells us so much more. For instance, he remarks that “no document has survived to tell us about the history of Mercian Kibworth”, yet this does not stop him imaginatively constructing over several pages a guess at its creation and form. Equally, he touches on the Viking burial at nearby Repton over the border in Derbyshire. Wood’s belief that the forging of the English character lies in such early times is manifested in his conclusion that, “The first three decades [of the tenth] century are among the most dramatic and action-packed in British history, out of which would appear a new social and political landscape” – of hundreds and shires, and of open fields – and where “class divisions were already strongly marked.” It’s a shame that Wood did not also set up a DNA project.Wood’s researches have uncovered some vitally important new information for the nation’s story. For instance, “As a microcosm of the great pestilence, the story of Kibworth Harcourt in particular puts this great event in the sharpest focus: … the death toll [of a massive seventy percent] is unsurpassed in any court roll so far examined in Britain for the Black Death.” He also finds “perhaps, remarkably, the earliest English letter by an English peasant to survive.”Wood’s story is very much a history from the point of view of `the ordinary man and woman’ and how national events impinged on their lives, whether it be the Barons’ Revolt or canal mania, Viking incursions or the enclosure of common fields. For example, Wood takes us through the Reformation using the wills of the villagers, and uses Sir Frederick Eden’s 1797 survey of the poor for later times. In his epilogue, he points out how “one can always generalize about history; one can always tell it through the stories of kings and queens. But it is always by particularizing, by looking at it from the point of view of the ordinary people, that we begin to see the gradual development of society over time.”Wood provides over nine pages of suggestions for further reading. The index is good but not without problems. For example, Medbourne is mentioned correctly on four pages, incorrectly on one, and missed out altogether on two more. And it is the fear that Wood has been poorly served by his publisher that concludes my review. The book is a very good read, indeed worthy of many re-readings, and Wood is to be congratulated on the result of so much hard work delving into the archives and traipsing around the landscape, not that he would have found either task taxing! But if only the publisher had provided the colourful plates that Wood’s colourful story demands; better maps; and a better cover – after only the first read of Wood’s book, the lettering on the jacket is already half-disappeared.

⭐I’d missed the series on TV when it was first shown in 2010, but caught it this time around, and being very interested in Leicestershire Local History was fascinated by it. I bought the book for reference and wasn’t disappointed at all.

⭐Some years ago there was a t.v. series based on this book and it was excellent.After reading the book it did not disappoint I thoroughly recommend it.

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