Total marks: 84 (including 4 marks for spelling, punctuation and grammar) · Duration: 105 minutes
Instructions to candidates
• Answer ALL questions in Section A and Section B. • Section A tests your knowledge of the thematic study Britain: Migration, empires and the people, c790 to the present day (40 marks). • Section B tests your knowledge of the British depth study Norman England, c1066–c1100, including the historic environment (44 marks, including 4 marks for spelling, punctuation and grammar). • You are advised to spend approximately 50 minutes on Section A and 55 minutes on Section B. • The marks for questions are shown in brackets. • Source A and Interpretation A were written for this practice paper. They are based closely on the kinds of evidence and historical writing you will meet in the examination, but they are not quotations from real documents. • In the real examination, AQA names a different historic environment site each year. This practice paper uses Durham Castle and Cathedral.
Paper
Section A — Britain: Migration, empires and the people, c790 to the present day (40 marks)
Source A: A letter from an Irish labourer working on the construction of a railway near Liverpool, written to his mother in County Mayo in 1847. It was later printed in an Irish newspaper as a warning to others thinking of leaving. (Written for this practice paper.)
Dear Mother, I take up my pen to tell you I am alive and in work, thanks be to God, though it is not the work I hoped for. We are building the line out from the city, two hundred of us from Mayo and Sligo, and we live in huts by the cutting, ten men to a hut, with the rain coming through the roof. The English navvies call us "Paddies" and will not drink in the same house as us, and there was a fight last Saturday when a gang of them came to drive us off, saying we work for less and steal their bread. It is true we work for less. What else can a man do when there is nothing at home but the black rot in the potatoes and the landlord's agent at the door? The money is better than at home, and I send you what I can. But tell Michael and the young ones not to believe the stories that the streets here are paved with gold. They are paved with mud, and there are more of our people sleeping in the cellars of Liverpool than there are in all of Castlebar. If you can, keep them at home until the famine passes. Your loving son, Patrick
Question 01
Study Source A.
How useful is Source A to a historian studying the experiences of Irish migrants in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century?
Explain your answer using Source A and your contextual knowledge.
(8 marks)
Question 02
Explain the significance of the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948 for migration to Britain.
(8 marks)
Question 03
Explain two ways in which the Viking settlement of England in the ninth and tenth centuries and the Norman Conquest of 1066 were similar.
(8 marks)
Question 04
Has economic opportunity been the main reason why people have migrated to Britain since c790?
Explain your answer with reference to economic opportunity and other factors.
Use a range of examples from across your study of Migration, empires and the people.
(16 marks)
Section B — Norman England, c1066–c1100 (44 marks, including 4 marks for SPaG)
Interpretation A: An interpretation of the Harrying of the North, written in the style of a modern historian. (Written for this practice paper.)
William's campaign in the North in the winter of 1069–70 was not simply a punishment; it was a calculated policy of terror. Faced with a rebellion that had united the English of Northumbria with a Danish fleet, the king chose to make the region incapable of supporting any future revolt. Villages were burned, livestock slaughtered, ploughs and seed corn destroyed. Contemporary chroniclers were horrified, and modern estimates of the dead, from violence and the famine that followed, run into tens of thousands. Seventeen years later, the Domesday survey recorded vast areas of Yorkshire as "waste". Whatever William intended, the North had been broken — and it did not rise against him again.
Question 05
How convincing is Interpretation A about the Harrying of the North?
Explain your answer using Interpretation A and your contextual knowledge.
(8 marks)
Question 06
Explain what was important about the Domesday Book for William I's rule of England.
(8 marks)
Question 07
Write an account of the ways in which William I dealt with English resistance between 1067 and 1071.
(8 marks)
Question 08
"The main reason the Normans built Durham Castle and Cathedral was to show their power over the North of England."
How far does a study of Durham Castle and Cathedral support this statement?
Explain your answer.
You should refer to Durham Castle and Cathedral and your contextual knowledge.
(16 marks + 4 marks for SPaG)