Wood Michael. The Story of England

Penguin, 2010. — 458 p.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.Michael David Wood, OBE FSA (b. 1948) is an English historian and broadcaster. He has presented numerous well-known television documentary series from the late 1970s to the present day. Wood has also written a number of books on English history, including In Search of the Dark Ages, The Domesday Quest, The Story of England, and In Search of Shakespeare He was appointed Professor of Public History at the University of Manchester in 2013.