The Story of England, page 9
Religion
The people of the village like most of the early English were pagans, worshipping their ancestral gods from Jutland – Thor, Woden, Thunor – and the auspicious deities of forest, river and spring of their British neighbours. They made offerings at trees, rocks and rivers, performed animal sacrifices, and did bloodlettings to propitiate spirits and avert the inauspicious hour, mixing blood or semen in their food for magical protection, fertility or potency.
The narrative of English history from the seventh century is portrayed in our histories as Christian. But in truth, as always, the reality was more complex. The conversion took many centuries and was perhaps never quite fully accomplished, at least in the terms in which the Church saw it. The early villagers had come with their ancestral gods from the continent: gods of storm and thunder, gods of fertility and auspiciousness. Faint traces of less salubrious demons (in the old English language) survived in the landscape near Kibworth until early modern times – Thyrspit in Nevill Holt and Shuggborowe in Burton Overy, where demons lurked; Tommor in Great Easton (a hobgoblin) – and Grendels (the name of the water demon in Beowulf ) were ubiquitous denizens of ponds, meres and water-filled pits. That such names have survived at all is testimony to the lingering power of these folk beliefs – a world of fairies and demons which declined only after the sixteenth-century Reformation. One particularly strong aspect of this, which was inherited by the early English from the Roman and Celtic past, is the ancient sacred wells that were mainly adopted by the Church in the Middle Ages but still survive all over England. Also noteworthy is the persistence of the belief in sacred trees, mentioned disparagingly by Bede in the eighth century. The meeting place of the jurors of the local hundred right up to the eighteenth century, as we have seen, was at the ‘Gartree’, a landmark tree on an ancient burial mound.
And close to Kibworth one sacred tree had a very long afterlife. In the woods at Great Easton a place called Holyoak Lodge marks the site of a pagan Anglo-Saxon shrine to the god of thunder, Thunor, which seems to have been worshipped long after the arrival of Christianity. As late as the twelfth century a little Christian hermitage – the Mirabel – was built close by to combat the continuing superstition of the locals. And on the gravestones in Kibworth for the last three centuries can be seen the names of the Holyoak family, who still flourish in Kibworth today. The thought-world of Old English paganism is by and large lost to us, but its sensibility underlies the later culture and language – and religion – of the English people.
4. The Beginnings of Kibworth
In the seventh and eighth centuries, like many villages in England, Kibworth emerges as a defined place and perhaps as a community: very likely this is when it got its name. The difficulty for the historian is that, as for most places in England at this time, any narrative still has to be composed from a virtually total lack of evidence, though the village dig in 2009 furnished a few significant clues. This period of the village story represents a horizon of change in which societies and economies in the West begin to pick up after the breakdown of the Roman world. The popular view is that the Dark Ages were a very hard time for ordinary people, most of whom were engaged in a lifelong battle against want, working first to feed their betters and then themselves, with the ever-present threat of famine, plague and war. This, one suspects, is by and large true. But brutal times are often also, out of sheer necessity, times of creation. And the roots of many rural and urban communities in England grew in this period.
The slow signs of recovery in the seventh and eighth centuries were brought about by that great institution of the Dark Ages: kingship. Chronicles and poems may sometimes give the impression that kings spent their time fighting battles, raiding, exacting tribute, hunting and feasting in the royal hall while bards sang their praises. But the law codes – one of the distinctive creations of the Barbarian West – tell another story. English law codes of the seventh century show that as soon as they came under the influence of the Church, Anglo-Saxon kings were expected to adapt the heroic warrior ethos of their ancestral Germanic tradition to the Christian moral universe. A king should not only be a ‘plunder lord’ and ‘ring giver’ but also look after the people, protect them against violence and want, and promote Christian religion. These ideals did not always sit easily with traditional Germanic kingship – winning battles, exacting tribute and gaining ‘everlasting glory’, as the poets of the Dark Ages put it. But there were many advantages to a king in joining in a Christian order with fellow kings and from the late seventh century the first signs of improvement in material life are shown by widespread evidence of trade, with the movement of pottery and coins. In the 2009 dig the first sherds were found in the village of high-status Ipswich ware pottery and of the tiny coins known as sceattas. Minted in their millions from the late 600s these coins are a clear sign of the growth of trade routes from the rich eastern seaboard, and from established royal trading ports or wics, such as Ipswich and London (Lundenwic). Another important emporium was ‘Saltwich’, the former Roman salt-making centre at Droitwich, what the Mercian charters called the vico emptorio salis with its coveted salt houses and furnaces spread over twenty or thirty outlying villages. Producing one of the essentials of life, this was one industrial centre from the Roman Empire (and it cannot have been the only one) which may have continued to function uninterrupted through the Dark Ages. In the eighth century salt ways spread out from it across southern England, including one that passes on the old ‘Jurassic’ track through Kibworth and Tur Langton.
But it is likely that life lived in the eighth century was nasty, brutish and short. The annals of the time are dotted with disasters: plague, cattle murrains, smallpox, even hurricanes. In the village the dry summer of 719 was followed by torrential rains and floods in 720. The period of drought and famine from the late 730s and early 740s culminated in 741, when ‘the land bore no fruit.’ The wet year of 759 inaugurated two years of pestilence and sickness, which caused havoc among the poor – especially in a virulent outbreak of enteric dysentery. The heat wave of summer 783 presaged more weather disruption with heavy snows later in the decade. All these phenomena were devastating to pre-industrial societies.
Hard times: Kibworth in winter 762
The event which stayed sharpest in the memory of most people in the eighth century was the severe winter of 762–3, which is recorded in annals across Britain and Ireland. There had been great snowfalls in each of the previous three winters, starting in 760: a pattern which had already precipitated famines. Now ‘there was a truly immense snowfall, and the thick snow hardened into ice, such as no one had ever seen before.’ According to Northumbrian annals ‘the snowfall oppressed the land from the beginning of winter’ (religious calendars generally note this as starting on 21 November with ‘the start of freezing frosts’, but perhaps a later date is meant), ‘almost till the middle of spring’. Irish observers agree that the ‘great snow’ stayed on the ground for three months creating ‘great scarcity and famine’. The cold was so severe that ‘many trees and plants withered, and even many marine animals were found cast up dead on frozen estuaries.’
In response to the big freeze people struggled as best they could to keep warm, and that same winter ‘towns, monasteries and villages in various districts and kingdoms were all at once devastated by fire,’ says a Northumbrian annalist, ‘for instance the calamity struck Stretburg, Winchester, Southampton, London, York, Doncaster and many other places.’ The result of people lighting fires in the extreme cold to keep warm, this is a vivid indicator of the bitter conditions of winter in the early Middle Ages. And, as with the mini-Ice Age of the 1310s, extreme winters were followed the next summer by scarcity, famine and an abnormally severe drought. Bread shortages are widely reported across Britain and Ireland. Such disasters in a subsistence society hit the peasantry hardest and the aftermath – in starvation, infant mortality, poor health and failed crops – must have been prolonged. For the scattered thatched mud huts along the low ridge where the village now stands, it was mostly a simple matter of survival. Sunset was early on those winter nights above the valley. In the law codes’ brief glimpses of the peasants’ existence, the villages shone as tiny pinpricks of light in a surrounding sea of darkness. There were wolves in the forests and the lonely horn of a traveller out late must alert the villagers to where he is for fear of being attacked as an intruder. Inside the houses lit by guttering oil lamps, those long cold dark nights were perhaps a time for songs, stories and poetry and for news of a wider world from a trader or returning pilgrim. And then early to bed. Another night in eighth-century England.
The beginnings of Kibworth
How then did the scattered early-Anglian settlement above the valley of the Welland become an English village called Kibworth? The village story now takes us into the days of the kings of Mercia, who were the first to call themselves kings of all the English. And, as for any English village, along with the topography the place name contains a first vital clue to the history. The name Kibworth means the ‘enclosure’ – worthig in Old English – of a man called Cybba. Who was this Cybba? This Anglian name appears nowhere else though there are related forms in the Midlands such as Cubbel. But it resonates suggestively with names in the Mercian royal family, particularly the alliterating ‘P’ names and ‘C’ names in two branches of the royal pedigrees, such as Pybba, Penda, Peada, Peaga, Crida and Cnebba. Like Pybba, or the royal holy woman Tibba, Cybba is bisyllabic and hypocoristic, a shortened diminutive as a nickname or term of endearment. The name evokes what an eighth-century writer called the ‘noblest line of the Middle Angles’, which could be counted back ‘step by step’ to Icil in the migration era. People had long memories in the Dark Ages and many Mercian nobles by the eighth century could trace their royal descent, however distant. Perhaps then Cybba belonged to a minor branch of the royal tree: a man who in the heyday of the Mercians in the eighth century was gifted his own estate by the king himself.
The second part of the name, ‘worth’, common as it is in England today, may also be surprisingly significant. Settlements’ names involving ‘worth’, though frequent in Old English charters, only start to appear from about 730. And some early ones in Mercia are of high status, like Brixworth with its magnificent royal church, the royal estate of Bosworth, or Northworthy, the old name of Derby, the ‘capital’ of the North Mercians. At an early stage the word seems to have developed a meaning akin to burh, ‘a fortified place’. Tamworth, the royal ‘capital’ and ancient centre of the South Mercians, changed its name from Tomtun (‘the tun of the dwellers on the River Tame’) in the early eighth century to Tomeworthig, when Mercian kings encircled it with a defensive enclosure, which has been excavated by modern archaeologists. Whether Anglo-Saxon Kibworth was just a ditched demesne farm or whether it actually had a defensive enclosure is not known, though a village ditch survives at Harcourt enclosing an area comparable to the Tamworth defences. In seventeenth-century maps the village still nestles inside this circuit, with its houses, tofts and gardens, the boundary defined by a hedge and ditch and a line of medieval fishponds.
Though no document has survived to tell us about the history of Mercian Kibworth, and though topography and archaeology are all we have on which to build our picture, we may guess an eighth-century date for ‘the enclosure of Cybba’. This would have been the lord’s residence, but attached to it just to the south may have been a village of dependent serfs which in time would become Kibworth Beauchamp. The crafts and artisanal skills which went with such a noble estate in the Dark Ages were provided by the village of metalworkers at the ‘smiths’ tun’, Smeeton, perhaps servicing both Cybba’s estate and the royal residence at Gumley, ‘Godmund’s wood’, a mile to the south. In the later Anglo-Saxon period the king himself retained part of Smeeton, and another royal hall lay on the River Glen two miles to the west. These royal centres were visited by the kings on their itineraries and must have loomed large in the lives of the Kibworth peasants who provided food supplies not only for their lord, but also for the royal feasts when huge numbers of royal courtiers and guests had to be fed.
As for Cybba himself, if the land was formally given to him as with other royal land leases of the eighth century, then we need only a little imagination to picture this founding moment. The scene is the royal hall at the vicus regius and hunting lodge of Gumley on the south border of Kibworth parish, where the Mercian kings Offa and Aethelbald held court several times at the height of their empire between the 740s and 780s. It is still a closed village today and thick woods still cover the hill where the Mercian kings hunted with hawks and hounds and speared wild boar. The king now is Aethelbald, a grizzled veteran, masterful and violent like most Dark Age kings, who owes his power to coming out on top in internecine feuds (and indeed he was eventually assassinated by his own bodyguard). Aethelbald may well be the king depicted in full powers on the recently discovered Repton stone sitting on a prancing warhorse with its docked tail, carrying a short shield, a flat bladed sword and a seax – the Anglo-Saxon short dagger – his stern face with big moustaches the very image of a Germanic king of the Dark Ages, ‘plunder lord, deed doer, ring giver, leader of men’.
In the hall are assembled kinsmen, sub-kings, the bishops of Lichfield and Worcester, some of the ealdormen of the tribes of the Middle Angles, and the thegns and companions, some of whose names we know: Peada, Ofa and Cusa. Present too are noble hostages from other kingdoms for that is how kings ruled outside their stemland: through military force, the exaction of tribute, the taking of hostages. The king himself was very likely illiterate, but his royal clerk impersonates him with high-flown titles, in Latin:
I Aethelbald by God’s gift king not only of the Mercians but also of all the provinces which go by the name of ‘South English’; for the good of my soul and the remission of my sins, freely grant to my faithful companion or minister, Cybba, a certain piece of land, namely twenty-five hides in the province called by men of old ‘Middle Angles’, by the river called aet Glenne with all perquisites belonging to it, fields, woods and meadow … and if anyone try to violate this gift let him know he will make reckoning to God on the great day of judgement. This charter is written in the year of our Lord 736 in the royal vill of Gumley in the province of the Middle Angles. I Aethelbald king of Britain confirm my own donation with the sign of the cross …
To this the scribe would have added a note on whether Cybba was free to bequeath his estate to any of his kin, and specifying the customary burdens on the estate: whether for example it was free of all secular dues except the customary road repairs and bridge and fortress construction, or military service. Perhaps the land of the lord (known as the inland) was farmed by unfree peasants for the lord’s own profit; and the free peasants (on what was known as warland) could sell their surplus but were liable for taxes and military service. As for the population of Kibworth in the eighth century, its tax assessment in later times (without Smeeton) was twenty-five hides: the hide of 120 acres being traditionally land enough to support one family. In reality the land had to support far more people in later Anglo-Saxon times, but if the assessment bears any relation to reality, then that might indicate that between a hundred and 150 people could have lived there in Cybba’s day.
In return for this gift of land Cybba might have had to pay the king annual rent. This could have been in silver coin, or war gear, or in horses and tack, the things a king constantly needed to replenish in order to reward and expand his armed following. But as important royal estates lay next door to Kibworth at Gumley and Glen, the rents are more likely to have been in kind, to feed the court with the surplus produced by the Kibworth peasants. A contemporary text gives us details of the food rent for a ten-hide estate:
10 vats of honey, 300 loaves, 12 ambers of Welsh ale, 30 of clear ale, full grown cows or 10 wethers, 10 geese, 20 hens, 10 cheeses, an amber full of butter, 5 salmon, 20 pounds of fodder [= about 500 bushels]and 100 eels.
As well as feeding and sustaining their lord Cybba, then, the unfree Kibworth peasants would have had to provide food supplies for the king when he was in residence with his court next door.
Cybba’s charter would also have briefly delineated the bounds of the land given and the rights to pasturage and timber. No early charters survive in this part of the East Midlands, but if all Kibworth was originally one estate (it had broken into several manors by the eleventh century) then the bounds would have been recorded in this way (some of these ancient boundaries survive in tithe maps of the eighteenth century, still using the old Anglo-Saxon word ‘mere’ for boundary): ‘These are the bounds of the estate at Cybba’s worth: first at the boundary of the ceorls’ tun [Carlton] along the Burton Brook by the boundary of the people of Glen to the wood at Godmund’s wood [Gumley] then from the boundary tree to the ford of the stream and then along the boundary of the people of Langton back to the brook at Carlton.’
Once this had been read out in the hall, the royal gift would be sealed with solemn oaths, with a symbolic piece of turf from the land placed on an open Gospel book. The charter was then copied twice on a sheet of vellum which was cut in two as a ‘chirograph’, the join in a sawtooth shape that could be fitted together to prove its authenticity. One half went to the king’s ‘halidom’, his relic box and treasury, which his Mass priests lodged in the cathedral archive at Lichfield; the other half went to Cybba himself to keep in his chest in his hall in Kibworth: to hold as the title to his ‘bookland’, lord of the settlement which from then on will bear his name.
