This module relates British history from the Norman Conquest to the end of the Victorian era. From the imposition of a feudal order by the Normans, with absolute power resting with the monarch, whilst bringing security to a land regularly raided and invaded, it proceeds through the bloody struggles for power which decimated the upper classes in the Wars of the Roses to the eventual emergence of a parliamentary democracy.
It helps teachers to trace how the inhabitants of a small group of islands, through trade, scientific inventions and technological innovations and commercial and military adventures, came to exert an extraordinary influence on events around the world - and how conditions for the ordinary working inhabitants, judged by measures such as life expectancy, showed small improvement over the centuries.