British History Trivia
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117 free British History trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
56 free British history trivia questions with answers. Two thousand years of British history in fifty-six questions. This quiz runs from Claudius's Roman invasion and Boudica's revolt through Alfred and the Vikings, Hastings and the Domesday Book, Magna Carta, the Black Death, the Wars of the Roses, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, the Gunpowder Plot, the Civil War and Cromwell, the Great Fire, the Union of 1707, Trafalgar and Waterloo, Victoria's empire, the suffragettes, Dunkirk and the Blitz, the birth of the NHS, Thatcher, the Falklands, the Good Friday Agreement and Brexit. Easy questions ask what happened in 1066 and how many times Henry VIII married; the hard ones want the poll-tax rate that sparked the Peasants' Revolt, the car park where Richard III turned up and the horse that killed Emily Davison. Written for history buffs, pub-quiz teams, GCSE revisers and anyone who watched too many period dramas. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the events, monarchs and battles involved, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 117 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Long after Julius Caesar's raids, which Roman emperor launched the conquest of Britain in AD 43?
Claudius
Claudius crossed the Channel himself for just sixteen days, long enough to see Colchester taken, then went home to celebrate a triumph in Rome.
Q 02Boudica, who led a revolt against Rome around AD 60, was queen of which tribe?
The Iceni
The Iceni. Tacitus says the revolt began after Roman officials had Boudica flogged and her daughters raped; her army burned Colchester, London and St Albans before the governor Suetonius Paulinus crushed it.
Q 03Which Roman emperor ordered a 73-mile wall built across northern Britain?
Hadrian
Hadrian's Wall was soon leapfrogged: his successor built a turf wall across central Scotland, but it was abandoned within a generation and the garrisons marched back to the stone one.
Q 04In AD 410, Emperor Honorius reportedly told Britain's cities to see to their own what?
Defence
Defence: Honorius was fighting to hold Italy, where Goths sacked Rome itself that same year, and had no troops to spare for a distant island.
Q 05The 793 raid marking the start of the Viking Age in Britain hit which Northumbrian monastery?
Lindisfarne
Lindisfarne. The 793 sack of Lindisfarne's monastery, on a tidal island off Northumberland, shocked Christian Europe; the monks later fled with St Cuthbert's body, which came to rest in Durham Cathedral.
Q 06At which 878 battle did Alfred the Great decisively defeat Guthrum's Viking army?
Edington
Edington. Months earlier a surprise attack had driven Alfred into hiding in the Somerset marshes; his comeback victory forced Guthrum to accept baptism and leave Wessex.
Q 07Which Suffolk site yielded a great Anglo-Saxon ship burial in 1939?
Sutton Hoo
Sutton Hoo's iron helmet came out of the ground in hundreds of rusted fragments; British Museum conservators pieced it together twice, redoing the work after flaws were found in the first attempt.
Q 08Which Danish king ruled England, Denmark and Norway in what historians call the North Sea Empire?
Cnut
Cnut. Cnut ruled England from 1016, Denmark from 1018 and Norway from 1028; the tale of him commanding the tide was first told to show his humility before God, not his arrogance.
Q 09Less than three weeks before Hastings in 1066, Harold Godwinson crushed a Norwegian invasion at which Yorkshire battle?
Stamford Bridge
Stamford Bridge. Harold marched his army some 180 miles north in four days to catch the invaders by surprise, then had to hurry back south to face the Normans at Hastings.
Q 10How is Harold II traditionally said to have died at Hastings?
An arrow to the eye
An arrow to the eye is what the Bayeux Tapestry seems to show, and later chroniclers repeat it, but another early account has Norman knights hack him down instead.
Q 11Despite its name, the Bayeux Tapestry is technically what kind of artwork?
An embroidered cloth
An embroidered cloth, stitched in wool thread on linen, not woven; Napoleon had it displayed in Paris as propaganda while he was planning his own invasion of England.
Q 12Which Archbishop of Canterbury was murdered in his own cathedral in December 1170?
Thomas Becket
Thomas Becket. Four knights killed him in Canterbury Cathedral on 29 December 1170, believing Henry II wanted him gone; his shrine there became a great pilgrimage site, the destination in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
Q 13King John sealed Magna Carta in June 1215 at which spot beside the Thames?
Runnymede
Q 21Which wife bore Henry VIII's son Edward?
Jane Seymour
Jane Seymour died twelve days after the birth in October 1537; of all his wives she was the one Henry chose to be buried beside, at Windsor.
Q 22What title did Parliament confirm for Henry VIII in 1534 after his break with Rome?
Supreme Head of the Church of England
Supreme Head of the Church of England. The 1534 Act of Supremacy made the title law; a pope had earlier named Henry Defender of the Faith for writing against Luther.
Q 23Which king was the son of Mary, Queen of Scots?
James I
James I, already James VI of Scotland, later had his mother's body moved from Peterborough to Westminster Abbey, where he built her a magnificent marble tomb.
Runnymede is a riverside meadow near Windsor; within months John had the pope declare the charter invalid and civil war followed, and only four copies of the 1215 text survive.
Q 14At which 1314 battle did Robert the Bruce defeat Edward II's English army?
Bannockburn
Bannockburn. Bruce's victory secured his hold on the Scottish throne, though England did not formally recognise Scottish independence until the Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton in 1328.
Q 15A chronicle records the Black Death reaching England in 1348 at Melcombe, now part of which Dorset port?
Weymouth
Weymouth. A friars' chronicle says a sailor aboard a ship from Gascony carried the plague ashore at Melcombe shortly before midsummer 1348, making its townsfolk the first in England to be infected.
Q 16Which rebel leader was struck down by London's mayor at Smithfield, ending the Peasants' Revolt of 1381?
Wat Tyler
Wat Tyler's rebels were furious at a poll tax of a shilling a head, triple the earlier rate; when he fell, the 14-year-old Richard II rode forward and talked the crowd into dispersing.
Q 17Henry V's archers routed the French at Agincourt in 1415 on which saint's feast day?
St Crispin's Day
St Crispin's Day, 25 October: overnight rain had turned the freshly ploughed field to mud that bogged down the armoured French, and Shakespeare later gave Henry his 'band of brothers' speech for the day.
Q 18In the Wars of the Roses, which side is traditionally given the red rose as its badge?
House of Lancaster
House of Lancaster. The red rose was probably little used while the fighting lasted; Henry VII, the Lancastrian claimant, joined it to York's white as the Tudor rose after marrying Elizabeth of York.
Q 19Richard III, killed at Bosworth in 1485, was found in 2012 buried under what in Leicester?
A car park
A car park. Archaeologists found the bones within days of starting to dig up the Leicester council car park; DNA from a living descendant of Richard's sister confirmed it was the king.
Q 20What did workmen find buried under a staircase in the Tower of London in 1674?
Two small skeletons
Two small skeletons. Charles II had the children's bones placed in Westminster Abbey as the lost princes, Edward V and his brother, though that identification has never been proven.
Q 24Which Spanish king sent the Armada against England in 1588?
Philip II
Philip II had once been England's king consort, as the husband of Mary I; English fireships broke up his fleet's formation, and storms wrecked many of its ships on the long way home.
Q 25Where did Elizabeth I deliver her famous speech to the troops in August 1588?
Tilbury
Tilbury. Elizabeth addressed the army camped at Tilbury in Essex on 9 August 1588, declaring she had 'the heart and stomach of a king'; by then the Armada had already been driven off.
Q 26What tipped off the authorities to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605?
An anonymous letter
An anonymous letter warned the Catholic peer Lord Monteagle to stay away from Parliament; he took it straight to the government, and a search found Fawkes guarding the gunpowder beneath the House of Lords.
Q 27Which tax did Charles I levy without Parliament, provoking John Hampden's refusal to pay?
Ship Money
Ship Money had been a levy on coastal areas to fund the navy; Charles demanded it from inland counties in peacetime, and seven of the twelve judges ruled against Hampden.
Q 28Charles I was executed in January 1649 outside which London building?
The Banqueting House, Whitehall
The Banqueting House, Whitehall. Charles walked out to the scaffold reportedly wearing two shirts, so that the crowd would not take his shivering in the January cold for fear.
Q 29What title did Oliver Cromwell hold from December 1653 until his death?
Lord Protector
Lord Protector. Cromwell took the office in December 1653 and kept it for life; in 1661 the restored monarchy dug up his corpse to hang and behead it as a traitor's.
Q 30Charles II entered London to restore the monarchy on 29 May 1660, which was also what?
His thirtieth birthday
His thirtieth birthday. Charles was born on 29 May 1630, so his entry into London in 1660 fell on his thirtieth birthday; the date was later kept as Oak Apple Day, recalling the Boscobel oak he hid in after Worcester.