Chapter 3: History — Set 10

Anne died without a surviving child in 1714 and was the last Stuart monarch; under the Act of Settlement the crown passed to George of Hanover.

The first census of Great Britain was held on 10 March 1801, after Parliament passed the Census Act in 1800; counts have been taken every ten years since, with very few exceptions.

The Statute of Rhuddlan was issued in 1284, after Edward I's conquest of the Welsh princes. It introduced the English system of laws and courts to Wales. (1295 was the year of Edward's famous 'Model Parliament'.)

Skara Brae survived because it was buried beneath sand, which protected its stone houses for thousands of years. It was uncovered after a great storm blew the covering sand away, revealing the village.

Edward the Confessor rebuilt the abbey church at Westminster — Westminster Abbey — as his royal burial church; it was consecrated on 28 December 1065 and Edward was buried there days later.

Henry II's travelling (itinerant) judges carried the king's justice around England, and by following each other's rulings they laid the foundations of the common law — a law common to the whole country.

At Stamford Bridge in September 1066 Harold defeated the invasion of Harald Hardrada, king of Norway — then marched south to face William at Hastings, where he was killed.

The Domesday survey was carried out in 1086, twenty years after the Norman Conquest, recording landholders, property and livestock across most of England.

St Albans was the Roman town of Verulamium, one of the largest towns in Roman Britain; Eboracum was York and Camulodunum was Colchester.

Caernarfon and Conwy are two of the great castles Edward I built in Wales after his conquest. They were part of the same settlement as the Statute of Rhuddlan (1284), which introduced English laws and courts to Wales.

After hiding in the Somerset marshes, Alfred defeated the Danes under Guthrum at Edington (Ethandun) in Wiltshire in 878, securing Wessex and leading to a peace treaty with the Vikings.

In response to rebellions, William's army systematically devastated northern England in 1069–70 — villages were burned and crops destroyed, causing a severe famine.

Edward I issued the Statute of Rhuddlan in 1284, introducing the English system of laws and courts to Wales, and built great castles such as Caernarfon and Conwy to hold down the country he had conquered. Offa's Dyke was built centuries earlier on the orders of King Offa of Mercia, and the Danelaw was the area of England under Danish law in the Viking age — neither was Edward's work.

Mary I married Philip of Spain in 1554; the marriage was deeply unpopular in England and Philip became king of Spain two years later.

James II fled to France and William and Mary took the throne in 1688–89 with remarkably little bloodshed in England itself, which is why the change is nicknamed the Bloodless Revolution.

Monmouth's rebellion ended at Sedgemoor in July 1685, the last pitched battle fought on English soil; Monmouth was captured and executed, and many of his followers were harshly punished.

Cotton spinning and weaving concentrated in Lancashire, where damp air suited the thread, coal powered the mills and ports such as Liverpool imported the raw cotton; Manchester became its commercial heart.

The 1834 Poor Law deliberately made relief hard to claim: the able-bodied poor could get help only inside the workhouse, whose conditions were meant to be worse than the lowest-paid job outside.

The Gallipoli campaign of 1915 aimed to seize the Dardanelles and Constantinople from the Ottoman Empire; after months of stalemate and heavy losses, the Allied forces were evacuated.

The Treaty of Versailles, signed in the Hall of Mirrors in June 1919, formally ended the war between Germany and the Allies and imposed reparations and territorial losses on Germany.

Germany's invasion of neutral Belgium — whose independence Britain had guaranteed by treaty in 1839 — brought Britain into the First World War in August 1914.

Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939; Britain and France, having guaranteed Polish independence, declared war two days later.

Neville Chamberlain resigned in May 1940 after the failed campaign in Norway, and Churchill took over as head of a coalition government — days before the evacuation from Dunkirk.

The Women's Land Army employed tens of thousands of 'Land Girls' on British farms during the Second World War, doing everything from milking cows to driving tractors.