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50 free Anglo-Saxon trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Six centuries sit between the last Roman legions leaving Britain and the Norman Conquest, and most of what England still is took shape in them: its name, its language, its shires, its oldest laws and its first kings. The Anglo-Saxons are easy to skip past on the way to 1066, which is exactly why they make such good trivia. This quiz covers the migrations and the first kingdoms, the coming of Christianity, Bede and the monasteries of the north, Alfred and the Danish wars, the great ship burial in Suffolk and the gold hoard from the Midlands, and the law, money and everyday words the period left behind. Every answer is sourced, and the explanations carry the detail that makes the facts stick. It suits pub-quiz regulars, history students and anyone who has walked a dyke, visited a cathedral or watched The Dig and wanted to know more. Play it through in rounds, or print it for a classroom or a quiz night.
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Q 01By legend, what did a fugitive Alfred the Great let burn while hiding in a Somerset peasant's hut?
Cakes
The cakes were wheaten ones she had left baking by the fire, and the unrecognised king was roundly scolded when she came back. Wessex alone was still holding out against the Vikings at the time.
Q 02Lady Godiva's legendary ride to win relief from her husband's taxes went through which town?
Coventry
Coventry staged a Godiva procession from 1678 into the 1960s, and 'Peeping Tom' comes from later versions in which one man, a tailor, spied on her ride and was struck blind. Her husband Leofric was a real 11th-century magnate.
Q 03Which word for cheap finery comes from 'St Audrey's lace', sold at the Ely fair held in that saint's name?
Tawdry
Tawdry is 'St Audrey' worn smooth: Audrey was the everyday form of Æthelthryth, the princess who founded Ely's abbey in 673, and her admirers bought modest lace goods at her fair.
Q 04Which title comes from Old English hlāfweard, the 'loaf-ward' who kept bread for his followers?
Lord
Lord is literally the bread-keeper, a fossil of the Germanic custom that a chief fed his war band. Over the centuries hlāfweard wore down to hlāford and then to a single syllable.
Q 05In which county did Terry Herbert's metal detector find the largest Anglo-Saxon gold hoard ever, in 2009?
Staffordshire
The Staffordshire Hoard's 4,600 pieces hold about 5 kg of gold and 3,500 garnets, and museums in Birmingham and Stoke paid £3.285 million to keep it. It turned up in a field near the village of Hammerwich.
Q 06Which self-taught archaeologist, played by Ralph Fiennes in The Dig, uncovered the Sutton Hoo ship?
Basil Brown
Basil Brown was pushed aside once Cambridge's Charles Phillips took over the dig, and only much later was he given full credit. Fiennes, fittingly, was born in nearby Ipswich.
Q 07Which monk landed on the Isle of Thanet in 597 and became the first Archbishop of Canterbury?
Augustine
Augustine's party considered turning back on the way and had to be urged on by letter from Rome before crossing to Kent. Within a few years he was baptising the local king.
Q 08Æthelred's byname unræd, long mistranslated as 'the Unready', actually puns on his name to mean what?
Ill-counselled
Ill-counselled is the joke: Æthel-ræd means 'noble counsel' and un-ræd 'no counsel', so the king named for good advice became the king of bad advice. Historians still argue over how far he deserved it.
Q 09Henry of Huntingdon's 12th-century label for the early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms counted how many of them?
Seven
Seven, the 'Heptarchy', is a tidy fiction: the number of kingdoms rose and fell, and there was never a time when exactly that many each had a king of its own. Historians still use the word for convenience.
Q 10Which third people, after the Angles and Saxons, did Bede say settled Kent and the Isle of Wight?
Jutes
The Jutes are the forgotten third founder-people, and Bede's map of where they settled is why Kentish counts as a dialect of Old English in its own right. Their homeland is usually placed in Jutland.
Q 11Bede said the Anglo-Saxons named which month Ēosturmōnaþ, after the goddess whose feast named Easter?
April
April's goddess rests on Bede's single mention, so scholars long suspected he invented her, until Roman-era altars to the 'matronae Austriahenae' were found in 1958. The Old High German name for the month, Ôstarmânoth, is a cognate.
Q 12Which year-numbering system, devised by Dionysius Exiguus, did Bede's history of 731 help spread?
Anno Domini
Anno Domini was a monk's calculation from the 520s that Bede picked up, and the popularity of his history carried 'years of the Lord' across Christian Europe. Bede even dated two events 'before the incarnation', an early form of BC.
Q 13Place names ending in -by, such as Kirkby, Grimsby and Selby, use which language's word for a village?
Q 21King Oswiu ruled at which 664 synod that Northumbria would date Easter by Rome's reckoning, not Iona's?
Whitby
Whitby's verdict also settled the monks' haircut: the Roman crown tonsure replaced the Irish style, and the losing party withdrew to Iona. The case for Rome was argued by the young Wilfrid.
Q 22Which kingdom, converted by the exiled Wilfrid from 681, was the last major Anglo-Saxon one to turn Christian?
Sussex
Sussex was in famine when Wilfrid arrived, and he is said to have taught the South Saxons to fish before they agreed to be baptised en masse. He stayed five years.
Q 23Which landowner, played by Carey Mulligan in The Dig, owned the Sutton Hoo treasure and gave it all away?
Edith Pretty
Old Norse
Old Norse left a trail of -by villages across the Danelaw; Kirkby alone, 'church village', recurs again and again across the north and east. The two tongues were still roughly mutually intelligible.
Q 14Which title replaced 'ealdorman' for England's regional governors during Cnut's reign?
Earl
Earl never grew a feminine form, which is why an earl's wife is a countess, a Norman word that otherwise never caught on in England. Ealdorman, the older title, faded out under Cnut.
Q 15Which silver coin, struck from about 785 at 240 to the pound, was Anglo-Saxon England's everyday money?
The penny
The penny kept the same nominal value, 1/240 of a pound, in continuous circulation for over 900 years, until the Kingdom of Great Britain arrived in 1707. Its silver is also what paid the Danegeld.
Q 16The Exeter Book, left to the cathedral by Exeter's first bishop in 1072, holds almost a hundred of what?
Riddles
Riddles sit beside elegies like The Wanderer and The Seafarer in a book its donor described only as 'one large English book on various subjects, composed in verse'. Two poems in it are signed by Cynewulf.
Q 17Bede has King Edwin's counsellor liken life to which creature's brief flight through a firelit hall?
A sparrow
A sparrow flies in out of the winter storm, crosses the warm hall and is gone into the dark again, and what came before or after, says the counsellor, we cannot know. Wordsworth later turned the image into verse.
Q 18The eyebrows, nose and moustache on the Sutton Hoo helmet combine to form which creature?
A dragon
A dragon with outstretched wings is made from the wearer's own face, and it bares its teeth at a second dragon diving down the helmet's crest. The helmet came out of the ground as more than 500 rusted fragments.
Q 19Whose coffin, borne by monks who had fled Lindisfarne, finally came to rest at Durham in 995?
Cuthbert
Cuthbert's wagon stuck fast on the road, and the monks took it as the saint's own wish to stop there; Durham city and its cathedral grew up around his tomb. He had been bishop of Lindisfarne from 684.
Q 20Which grandson of Alfred took the last Viking kingdom in 927 and is counted as the first King of England?
Æthelstan
Æthelstan's overlordship over the rest of Britain in the 930s was, one historian says, 'perhaps not attained again by an English king until Edward I'. Others still debate whether the title fits.
Edith Pretty handed the whole trove to the British Museum after a treasure-trove inquest had ruled the grave goods her personal property. She had organised the excavation of the mounds on her estate herself.
Q 24Which Welsh monk from St David's, later Bishop of Sherborne, wrote the Life of King Alfred in 893?
Asser
Asser's Life is why Alfred is the one Anglo-Saxon king we know as a personality, though doubters have periodically called the whole book a forgery. Alfred had summoned him from Wales to his court.
Q 25Alfred's treaty with Guthrum ran the Danelaw border up the Thames, Lea and Ouse to which Roman road?
Watling Street
Watling Street was the one man-made stretch of a frontier otherwise drawn by water: the Thames, the Lea to its source, a straight line to Bedford, then the Ouse. Everything north and east of it was Guthrum's.
Q 26Lincoln, Nottingham, Stamford and Leicester were four of the Danelaw's Five Boroughs, and the fifth?
Derby
Derby was the first of the five to fall back into English hands, captured in 917, and Leicester surrendered without a fight the following year.
Q 27Which king's 973 coronation at Bath set the rite on which every later English coronation has been based?
Edgar
Edgar's service gave the ceremony its shape, its oath and its anthems, down to the two bishops who led him by the hand into Bath Abbey. His queen Ælfthryth was consecrated beside him, the first West Saxon queen regularly styled regina.
Q 28Which 8th-century king's dyke still roughly follows the border between England and Wales?
Offa
Offa also had a gold coin struck copying an Abbasid dinar of 774, 'Offa Rex' stamped amid three lines of Arabic that the die-cutter set upside down. Only three of his gold coins survive.
Q 29Which pagan king of Mercia killed Oswald of Northumbria at Maserfield and died at the Winwaed in 655?
Penda
Penda was the last great pagan warrior-king of the Anglo-Saxons, and his victory at Maserfield left him the most powerful ruler in Britain for a decade. He had earlier helped destroy King Edwin at Hatfield Chase.
Q 30Which East Anglian king, one of Bede's overlords of the south, is the likeliest occupant of the Sutton Hoo ship?
Rædwald
Rædwald hedged his bets, keeping two altars in one temple, one to Christ and one to the old gods; the coins in the ship date to the 620s, matching his death around 624.