F.B.A. provides an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feeling and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available.

This book provides a great overview of England.

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. In the thirteenth century the village was bought by William de Merton, who later founded Merton College, Oxford, with the result that documents covering 750 years of village history are lodged at the college.

Building on this unique archive, and enlisting the help of the current inhabitants of Kibworth, with a village-wide archeological dig, with the first complete DNA profile of an English village and with use of local materials like family memorabilia, 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.

The story of Kibworth is the story of England itself, a ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ for the entire nation. It is the subject of a six-part BBC tv series to be shown in autumn 2010.

Review: For small country off the edge of Europe, England’s influence on the history of the world has been disproportionately great. Its language and literature, its ideas about politics and freedom have spread across the whole of the globe. But what is England and who are the English? And how did the English people develop their unique way of seeing the world?

In this tale of epic sweep and mesmerizing detail, Michael Wood tells the story of an English community from the Romans till today, exploring the national narrative through the eyes of one If England was any English community. Its story is the story of departing Romans, Saxon and Viking immigrants, Norman conquerors; of the Great Famine and the Black Death; of religious and political conflicts, and the Industrial Revolution; of Empire and two world wars. All made their impact on this small community. And through it all, with their tenacity and tolerance, and their ways of organizing society, the people pass down their cultural DNA to the modern English.

Using a uniquely rich documentary archive, as well as recent archaeological discoveries, letters, tax rolls, photographs and diaries, The Story of England unfolds a tale of real people which at times reaches the intimacy of a novel.It shows how history can be told not just from the top but from the bottom too – this is a story of Anglo-Saxon peasants, medieval reeves, Tudor vicars, Victorian framework knitters and First World War soldiers.

Above all it is a tale of many surprises – of a richly mixed inheritance constantly reshaped by the arrival of newcomers, of an identity always in the making never made. It’s a people’s History of England, told through the history of one small community.