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Restoration England 1660-1685Exam Focus

Exam Technique: Historic Environment

Part of The Plague of 1665 — GCSE History

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 8 exam-style questions and 4 flashcards. This is a high-frequency topic, so it is worth revising until the explanation feels precise and repeatable. 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.

Topic position

Section 7 of 16

Practice

8 questions

Recall

4 flashcards

📝 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

    • Keep building this topic

    Read this section alongside the surrounding pages in The Plague of 1665. That gives you the full topic sequence instead of a single isolated revision point.

    Why Were the Poor Hit Hardest?Why Was the Plague So Deadly in 1665? — The Chain of CausesSetting the SceneWhat Caused the Plague?

    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.

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    Why Were the Poor Hit Hardest?

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