History: the earliest times to 1666

Twenty questions on the first half of the Life in the UK history chapter: from Stonehenge to the Great Fire of London.

The history chapter is where most people lose marks, and it is worth being clear about why. The difficulty is not that the history is hard. It is that five thousand years and more arrive at a fairly even level of detail, so nothing tells you which facts matter more than others, and the questions ask for exactly the things that are hardest to hold without a shape to hang them on — dates, names and numbers.

The confusions this test is built around

Almost every wrong option here is a real fact from elsewhere in the chapter. The pairs worth separating deliberately:

• 55 BC, AD 43, AD 410. Caesar's failed expedition; the actual Roman conquest a century later; and the year the Romans left.
• The three invasions. Anglo-Saxons from what is now northern Germany, southern Denmark and the Netherlands, Vikings from Denmark and Norway, Normans from northern France. Three arrivals, three directions, routinely swapped.
• The Domesday Book and Magna Carta. A survey of land made for a conqueror in 1086; a charter of rights forced on a king in 1215. Different centuries, different purposes.
• 1603 and 1707. The crowns of England and Scotland came to one man in 1603; the countries themselves were not joined until 1707. This one catches people constantly, and it is asked from both directions.
• Hastings, Bosworth, Agincourt, Culloden. Only one of them was fought between two English royal houses for the English throne — which is what identifies Bosworth as the end of the Wars of the Roses.

Two things that reward a moment's thought

Henry VIII's break with Rome had an immediate cause and a larger consequence, and the test asks about the cause: the Pope would not annul his first marriage. The reformation of doctrine followed the break rather than producing it.

And the Restoration of 1660 restored an institution, not a building or a church — Parliament invited Charles II back, eleven years after his father had been executed and the country had become a republic under Cromwell.

What to do with this

Take it once cold and see which of the twenty will not stick. There will be fewer than you fear, and those are the ones worth the work — rereading the whole chapter again is the least efficient thing you can do with the time.

The questions and explanations here are Zestly's own, written from publicly known facts. No text is reproduced from the official handbook, which is a separate copyrighted publication and the only real syllabus.

• Keep 55 BC, AD 43 and AD 410 apart — the failed expedition, the conquest, and the departure
• Attach each invasion to where its people came from: Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Normans
• Say what the Domesday Book was and what Magna Carta did, and place each in its century
• Explain what happened in 1603 and why it is not the same as 1707
• Identify the battle that ended the Wars of the Roses and the dynasty it began
• Give the immediate reason Henry VIII broke with Rome, and what the Restoration of 1660 restored

Written from publicly known facts of British history, covering the ground the official syllabus sets out for this period: Stonehenge and the earliest settlements; the Roman invasion of AD 43 and Hadrian's Wall; the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings and the Norman Conquest of 1066; the Domesday Book of 1086 and Magna Carta of 1215; the Black Death; the Wars of the Roses and Bosworth Field in 1485; Henry VIII, the break with Rome and the six wives; Elizabeth I and the Spanish Armada of 1588; the union of the crowns in 1603 and the Gunpowder Plot of 1605; the Civil War, the execution of Charles I in 1649 and Cromwell's Protectorate; the Restoration of 1660 and the Great Fire of London in 1666. No wording is taken from the official handbook, which is a commercial copyrighted publication.