Life in the UK Practice Test 26

The Model Parliament of 1295 included lords, clergy, knights chosen by the counties and burgesses from the towns, and later parliaments were modelled on that mixture.

At Agincourt in 1415, Henry V's army, with its longbowmen, defeated a much larger French force during the Hundred Years War.

William Caxton introduced printing to England, setting up the country's first printing press at Westminster in about 1476.

During the break with Rome the monasteries were dissolved and their lands and wealth seized by the Crown, and Sir Thomas More, Henry's former Lord Chancellor, was executed in 1535 for refusing to accept the king as head of the Church in England. The Authorised Version of the Bible was not published until 1611, under James I, and Mary I's marriage to Philip of Spain belonged to her own reign, after Henry's death.

Mary I tried to restore Roman Catholicism and had hundreds of Protestants burned at the stake, which earned her the nickname 'Bloody Mary'.

Elizabeth I reigned from 1558 to 1603, about 45 years, a long reign often described as a golden age of English culture.

Raleigh organised and promoted expeditions to found English colonies in North America, including the Roanoke voyages, though the early settlements did not survive.

John Cabot landed on the coast of North America in 1497, the first recorded European voyage to reach the mainland since the Vikings.

At Marston Moor in 1644 the combined forces of Parliament and its Scottish allies crushed the Royalist army, and Charles I lost control of the north.

When James II's queen gave birth to a son in 1688, it seemed a Catholic dynasty would continue, so leading figures invited William of Orange to intervene.

When the Stockton and Darlington Railway opened in 1825 it was the world’s first public railway to use steam locomotives, initially mainly for coal traffic; regular steam passenger services followed on later lines.

London's Metropolitan Railway opened in 1863, running steam trains in tunnels between Paddington and Farringdon; it was the world's first underground railway.

Brunel designed the Great Western Railway, the Clifton Suspension Bridge and the SS Great Britain. The Crystal Palace was designed by Joseph Paxton for the Great Exhibition of 1851.

The Great Exhibition of 1851 displayed machinery, technology and manufactured goods from Britain and other countries inside the purpose-built Crystal Palace.

The Reform Act of 1867 extended the franchise to male householders in the boroughs, so many working-class men in towns and cities gained the vote.

The Reform Act of 1867 gave the vote to many working-class men in towns who were householders, and the Reform Act of 1884 extended the same household rules to men in the countryside. The Act of Settlement settled the succession to the throne, and the Poor Law Amendment Act was about help for the poor through workhouses — neither Act changed who could vote.

Wilfred Owen wrote some of the best-known poems of the First World War, describing the suffering of ordinary soldiers in the trenches; he was killed in 1918.

With so many men away fighting, large numbers of women took factory jobs, including dangerous work making shells and explosives in munitions factories.

At Bletchley Park, codebreakers read German military messages protected by the Enigma machine, giving Britain vital intelligence during the Second World War.

Alan Turing was central to cracking Enigma at Bletchley Park, designing machines to speed up the work, and he later became one of the founders of computer science.

Radar gave early warning that German air raids were on their way, and Spitfire fighters, designed under R. J. Mitchell, helped the RAF keep control of the skies. The bouncing bomb was not used until the Dambusters raid of 1943, and the Home Guard was a part-time volunteer force preparing to resist a land invasion — it played no part in the air battle.

The Home Guard was a volunteer, part-time force of men not serving in the regular forces, often older men, organised to help resist a German invasion.

Many of the weavers who settled in medieval England came from Flanders, in the Low Countries (modern-day Belgium), a region famous across Europe for its fine woollen cloth.

The Cavaliers were the Royalists — the supporters of Charles I in the Civil War, fighting against Parliament and its supporters, the Roundheads. Despite the similar name, they were not simply cavalry soldiers: 'Cavalier' was a nickname for the king's side as a whole.