Charts events in the village leading to the people's involvement in the Civil War of Simon de Montfort and follow the story of Kibworth as it reaches the catastrophic 14th century. The village goes through the worst famine in European history, and then, as revealed in the astonishing village archive in Merton College Oxford, two-thirds of the people die in the Black Death. Helped by today's residents - field walking and reading the historical texts - and by the local schoolchildren digging archaeological test pits, Michael Wood follows stories of individual lives through these times, out of which the English idea of community and the English character begin to emerge.