The Story of England

· Penguin UK
Ebook
480
Pages
Eligible
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About this ebook

A VILLAGE AND ITS PEOPLE THROUGH THE WHOLE OF ENGLISH HISTORY

The 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

About the author

Michael Wood was born and educated in Manchester. He was an open scholar in Modern History at Oriel College, Oxford, where he held a Bishop Fraser scholarship in Medieval History as a postgraduate. He has made a number of internationally successful tv series, including In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great, and four of his books have been UK non-fiction number one bestsellers. His highly acclaimed book of essays on early English history, In Search of England, was published by Penguin in 1999.

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