Story of England
Maya Vision is excited to introduce a new 6 part BBC series: Michael Wood's Story of England. Michael tells the story of one community through the whole of English history. Using documents, landscape, buildings, science and archaeology, and with the help of the villagers themselves, he explores the lives of the ordinary people against the backdrop of national events across more than a thousand years.
Winner - Voice of Listener & Viewer Awards for Excellence in Broadcasting in 2010, Best New Television Programme
The place is Kibworth in Leicestershire, in the heart of England. Through this one location, rich in documents and stories, the series chronicles the story of England from the beginning and from the bottom up.
Moving between the national and the local narratives, Michael sets the lives of the ordinary people in the context of great events: from the Viking invasions and the Norman Conquest to the Industrial Revolution and the two World Wars. Today’s villagers uncover archaeological evidence to fill in the unknown history of the village before 1066, charting the coming of Romans Anglo-Saxons and Vikings into the village; they help dig into local and national archives, reconstruct a Victorian village concert, and we go with them on a school trip to World War One battlefields.
Conjuring intimate details from the documents, we hear the real voices of the villagers of the past read by today’s people: peasants speaking up for England in the Civil War of 1265, the village bailiff recounting the horrors of the Black Death, the butcher recommending a village boy for higher education in 1447, a Victorian serving girl sending her poignant postcards from London, longing for Christmas back home in the village. Over the series we see how the great changes in English history were driven by the ordinary people, whose struggles brought about the end of serfdom, the spread of literacy and education, changes in the status of women, and the growth of English individualism - a key factor in Britain’s rise to world empire.
So through the eyes of one community, Story of England charts the journey of the ordinary people through time, and shows them struggle with invasion and catastrophe and embrace innovation and opportunity. It’s a journey that sees the development of our language and laws, our rights and freedoms, our ways of doing and seeing. In the Story of England we see how they became us.