As per my excited post yesterday, I spent the evening in Bath listening to my favorite historian, Michael Wood. He was talking about his recent book and TV series, The Story of England [buy isbn=”9780670919031″] (which Nick Waller recommended in comments yesterday). There was lots of interesting material, but considering my international audience what I want to focus on was giving you some idea of what we Brits mean by living in a “class society”.

Wood’s book tells the history of England through the medium of one village in Leicestershire (not that far away from Hinckley, the site of many Eastercons). I say “one village”, but Kibworth is actually two very separate villages: Kibworth Harcourt, where the upper class people live; and Kibworth Beauchamp, where the lower class people live. Field names in the area suggest, but my no means prove, that this division dates all the way back to the 6th Century when Anglo-Saxon migrants arrived to lord it over the local Britons, but you would be laughed at today if you suggested that class distinctions between white people in the UK have any ethnic basis.

That doesn’t make them any less real. The church in Kibworth has two doors: one for Harcourt people and one for Beauchamp people. But the anecdote that really illustrates the difference between the two villages comes from much more recent history. Not that long ago (I think early 20th Century) a new sewerage system was being proposed for the village. This was the cause of considerable dispute. The people of Kibworth Harcourt wanted to have two entirely separate sewerage systems built, because they did not want their effluent contaminated with that of Beauchamp people.

My thanks to my pal Marjorie for providing me with a souvenir of the event.