This exam focus covers Exam Technique: Historic Environment within The Plague of 1665 for GCSE History. Revise The Plague of 1665 in Restoration England 1660-1685 for GCSE History with 10 exam-style questions and 15 flashcards. This topic appears regularly enough that it should still be part of a steady revision cycle. It is section 7 of 16 in this topic. Treat this as a marking guide for what examiners are looking for, not just a fact list.

📝 Exam Technique: Historic Environment

If the Great Plague is your historic environment site, you need to know:

Location specifics: Outer parishes hit first and hardest — St Giles in the Fields, Whitechapel, Stepney. The wealthy City and West End suffered later. Poorest areas had worst overcrowding and sanitation.

Physical evidence: Plague pits (mass graves), surviving parish registers recording deaths, Bills of Mortality documents, remaining buildings from the period

Primary sources: Samuel Pepys's diary is the key source — he was present throughout, a government official, and wrote daily entries. Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) reconstructs the experience but is not a genuine contemporary diary.

Connection to broader themes: Shows limits of medical knowledge (miasma theory); shows social divisions (rich fled, poor died); shows government's limited capacity to respond

Practice questions for The Plague of 1665

What bacterium caused the bubonic plague that devastated London in 1665?

A. Yersinia pestis
B. Streptococcus pyogenes
C. Bacillus anthracis
D. Clostridium perfringens

1 markfoundation

Approximately how many people died in London during the Great Plague of 1665?

A. Around 25,000 (about 5% of London's population)
B. Around 100,000 (about 25% of London's population)
C. Around 250,000 (about 60% of London's population)
D. Around 500,000 (over 100% of London's population)

1 markfoundation

Quick recall flashcards

What were buboes?

Swollen, blackened lymph nodes (usually in groin, armpits, or neck) — the characteristic symptom of bubonic plague. The appearance of buboes triggered house quarantine. Death typically followed within 2-5 days; mortality without treatment was 60-70%.

What was miasma theory?

The dominant 17th-century belief that plague was caused by 'bad air' (miasma) from rotting matter. Led to useless responses: bonfires to purify air, posies of flowers, fumigation. The theory was completely wrong — plague was bacterial, spread by fleas on rats.

Why Were the Poor Hit Hardest?

Why Was the Plague So Deadly in 1665? — The Chain of Causes

Exam Technique: Historic Environment