Britain After 1066
Follow one thread of British life across the centuries after 1066 — how homes, crime and punishment, medicine, or childhood changed from castles and plague to the present day — spotting turning points and things that barely moved
What a learner can do afterwards
- Trace one theme (e.g., medicine or childhood) across several periods of British history and describe how it changed
- Place the major periods after 1066 in order (medieval, Tudor, Victorian, modern) when telling the story of their theme
- Point out a turning point in their theme and explain why things changed then (e.g., Victorian laws ending children's factory work)
The lesson
History is not only battles and kings. You can pick one small part of life, like what it means to be a child, and follow it from 1066 all the way to today. Some parts of the story change fast. Other parts barely move.
In medieval times, most poor children worked from about age seven: hauling water, weeding fields, minding animals. Two hundred years later, in Tudor times, a wealthy family might send a boy to school, but a poor child still went straight to work.
By Victorian times, factories and mines needed workers, and children as young as five worked long, dangerous hours. When people found out how bad it was, Parliament passed laws banning young children from factory work and later made school compulsory for every child.
The Victorian laws are the turning point: work for young children stopped because a law stopped it, not because it faded away on its own. But one thing barely changed at all: children have always helped their families, medieval or modern, just in different ways.
From medieval fields to Victorian factories to today's classrooms, childhood changed a lot, and the biggest turning point was Victorian laws that sent children to school instead of work.
Watch it
Where it sits
Learn first
This opens up
Nothing builds on it yet.
8 questions wait behind this lesson, each with its answer explained. Every answer feeds the sky: stars light as they are learned, and dim when it is time to come back.