Michael Wood has been my hero since first we danced together in my salad days on the road to Eleusis. Since then we have searched Mycenae and the hill at Hissarlik and have walked in the footsteps of Alexander. He illuminated the Dark Ages for me and introduced me to Beowulf. We have even been to Shangri-La together. Most recently we have travelled through time observing the ages of an English village and it is this history of England which was the subject of tonight’s lecture.

Michael explained to an attentive and appreciative audience his original inspiration as an historian and how revelatory he had found the detailed characters in the Anglo Saxon Chronicles. He then elaborated on the thinking behind “The Story of England” book and TV series and was insightful not only about the historical background but also the historians, characters and personalities which inspired him (one Merton Fellow instructed him not to forget the Framework Knitters)and how the project came to fruition through the commissioning process at the BBC. He had not wanted to generalize but to focus on one location and tell the story of a nation through place by particularising and he quoted Blake “To generalize is to be an Idiot. To particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit”.

He then went on to explain the criteria he used which led him to Kibworth in Leicestershire as the subject of this project: an English village; a bottom-up perspective looking at everyday lives; a collaborative project with the local community; not a village in the South East and most significantly a village which is well documented. Finally he was aware that a proportion of Kibworth was bequeathed to Merton College by its founder and the college has a library and archive begun in 1363 and consequently holds a continuous written record of Kibworth from the twelfth century. In fact the earliest written record of the village is a brief entry in the Doomsday Book. So to take the village’s history back Michael and his team, including Carenza Lewis and Paul Blinkhorn, embroiled the community in digging a large number of what turned out to be very successful test pits – they found prehistoric flint shards, Roman samian ware and Anglo-Saxon pottery. The team also collaborated with experts in a number of fields: aerial photography, geophysics, metal detecting etc.

The book and programme then chart the development of the village to the present day reflecting on the impact of the open field system, famine and plague, the Tudor age, Civil War, Industrialisation etc. This development is told through detailed examination of the lives of people living in the village at the time, the impact of change on their everyday lives and these grass root stories are then extrapolated to tell the wider story of England through the ages. Michael’s research revealed a richness of individual stories in Kibworth and unearthed some previously unknown records from the now closed local grammar school and a local newsletter produced during WWII and circulated to all the village’s 44 combatants – wherever they were serving in the world – and much anticipated and applauded if the letters section was anything to go by.

It was clear from the small glimpse into the Kibworth project that Michael Wood was able to give tonight’s audience that such projects are very insightful and have great benefits not only for the individual historian but also for the wider community who are involved, and the broader audience who can engage with this process. In these days of austerity there has been little funding for local archaeology although there would appear to be a great appetite amongst the general public to pursue this knowledge. The project at Kibworth and other similar projects such as Mick Aston’s community digs are surely the way forward.

Michael’s charming, erudite and above all enthusiastic lecture clearly only skated the surface of his knowledge of Kibworth (and many other times and places) and there was no time to discuss the detailed analysis of place names, dendrochronology, the Roman villa they found, the villages involvement in Simon de Montfort’s rebellion or the Luddites. And I never did get to find out about the Framework knitters. So I’ll keep following my hero – we’re off to China next.