The Story of England
Michael Wood (Viking, 2010)

Speaking at the Swindon Festival of Literature in May 2011, historian Michael Wood gave the audience an insight into his approach to the project that took up a year of his life and formed the subject of a BBC Television series and accompanying book.  In The Story of England, Wood attempts to evoke the impact of the vast historical changes that England underwent -from the departure of the Romans to the world wars of the twentieth century—via the study of a single place throughout the entire period, namely Kibworth, Leicestershire.

One might imagine that after following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, the prosaic surroundings of rural Leicestershire would seem a less than enthralling prospect to Wood, but to him this represented a welcome homecoming not only to England but to his Anglo-Saxon specialism.  As an historian he knows that "every place has its drama, every place has its story," and that the local and regional intertwine with the national narrative that has more commonly been the subject of historical investigations of England's past.

Whilst the increasing popular interest in local and family history goes some way towards explaining the popularity of the television series and the book itself, this opportunity to examine history 'from the bottom up' enabled Wood to take what he stresses is a serious historiographical approach: to 'particularise' in order to generalise. In this endeavour he acknowledges the influence of William George Hoskins' approach to landscape and English local history, as developed in the seminal work The Making of the English Landscape.

Through a forensic study of the changing topography of Kibworth, Parish records, wills, journals, and records of Merton College (owners of most property in Kibworth since the thirteenth century), Wood traces developments in farming and agricultural organisation, from the open field system to the enclosures that presaged a new age of industrialised farming and urbanisation.  We see the population and cultural identity of the area evolve from the Corieltauvi through the Roman, Saxon, and Viking invasions, and the Norman Conquest.  From there, by tracing the histories of local families, he shows the searing impact of famine and plague in the Black Death.  We see the divisions engendered by the Reformation and the Civil War, and the emergence of a strong and continuing tradition of dissent in non-conformist religious observance (such as the Lollards and the Quakers) along with the more explicitly political radicalism of the Peasants' Revolt, the early socialists, the suffragettes, and the conscientious objectors in the Great War.  A yearning for unity is evidenced by wills that address the needs of the parish poor, yet that seemingly ever-present aspect of English cultural identity—class distinction—is expressed through the differing parishes of Harcourt, Beauchamp and Smeeton that go to make up the village of Kibworth.

Wood is a gifted communicator on television, in person and in writing. What leaps from the page, and is even more evident when he speaks about his subject, is his genuine interest in people, the small everyday stories in ordinary towns and villages that constitute the big stories that we call history, the 'givenness' of our past.  Wood taps the micro-historical approach for rich insights that shed new light on old stories.

So can we derive the story of England from the history of one village?  Can we say something valuable about the national character from a very particular study of one local group? Does such an approach show how a shared cultural identity is forged, and how it is ever evolving, shaped by the historical events that impact individuals, their families and livelihoods, and the towns and villages in which they live? To this reviewer the answer is an emphatic yes. Wood makes an impressive case for the importance of history from below in helping us to find meaning in the national narrative.  What becomes clear in this story is that there is no settled 'state of England': there is this land that defines us as English by virtue of our inhabitation, a relationship that is reciprocal, because all those who live in this England shape it and are shaped by it.  --Steve Cox

Copyright © Steve Cox 2011.