Village life opens door to 'The Story of England' First of four parts 8 p.m. Tuesday, with subsequent episodes through July 24, on PBS. If you think you've seen enough documentaries on English history to write a dissertation on the subject, you haven't seen "Michael Wood's the Story of England," blessedly free of royalty, beheadings, missing princes and imprisoned pretenders to the throne, but thrillingly alive with details about the quotidian life of a small village. There are no ornate tombs of common tradesmen in Westminster Abbey, no grand portraits of farmers who plowed narrow strips designated for their use in communal fields, no relics behind museum glass of the family of drapers who were lucky enough to open a second shop in nearby Coventry. At one point, for example, Kibworth became a veritable hotbed of religious "heresy," with figures such as John Wycliffe, a theologian and religious reformer who was master of Balliol College at Oxford, inspiring religious "nonconformists" in Kibworth who became members of the group known as the Lollards. [...] Kibworth is trisected into Kibworth Smeeton, Kibworth Beauchamp and Kibworth Harcourt, with the last sub-village being home to "the munt," an irregularly shaped mound whose history may be more than just geological: The great historical moments in English history, moments we may already know about, happened just as much for Kibworth as they did for the nation, from the Anglo-Saxon and Viking settlements, through the Norman invasion, the drastic population depletion caused by the Black Death, the English Civil War and beyond.