Anglo-Saxon Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
50 free Anglo-Saxon trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Six centuries sit between the last Roman legions leaving Britain and the Norman Conquest, and most of what England still is took shape in them: its name, its language, its shires, its oldest laws and its first kings. The Anglo-Saxons are easy to skip past on the way to 1066, which is exactly why they make such good trivia. This quiz covers the migrations and the first kingdoms, the coming of Christianity, Bede and the monasteries of the north, Alfred and the Danish wars, the great ship burial in Suffolk and the gold hoard from the Midlands, and the law, money and everyday words the period left behind. Every answer is sourced, and the explanations carry the detail that makes the facts stick. It suits pub-quiz regulars, history students and anyone who has walked a dyke, visited a cathedral or watched The Dig and wanted to know more. Play it through in rounds, or print it for a classroom or a quiz night.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01By legend, what did a fugitive Alfred the Great let burn while hiding in a Somerset peasant's hut?
Cakes
The cakes were wheaten ones she had left baking by the fire, and the unrecognised king was roundly scolded when she came back. Wessex alone was still holding out against the Vikings at the time.
Q 02Lady Godiva's legendary ride to win relief from her husband's taxes went through which town?
Coventry
Coventry. The phrase 'Peeping Tom' comes from later versions of the legend, in which a tailor who spied on her ride was struck blind.
Q 03Which word for cheap finery comes from 'St Audrey's lace', sold at the Ely fair held in that saint's name?
Tawdry
Tawdry is 'Saint Audrey' run together. Bede says she blamed the neck tumour that killed her on the necklaces of her youth, which is how her fair came to sell lace for the throat.
Q 04Which title comes from Old English hlāfweard, the 'loaf-ward' who kept bread for his followers?
Lord
Lord is literally the loaf-guard: hlāfweard wore down to hlāford and then to one syllable, while a household servant was a hlāfǣta, a 'loaf-eater'.
Q 05In which county did Terry Herbert's metal detector find the largest Anglo-Saxon gold hoard ever, in 2009?
Staffordshire
Staffordshire. Almost every piece is war gear stripped from swords and helmets, with nothing feminine among it, and two local museums paid £3.285 million to keep it.
Q 06Which self-taught archaeologist, played by Ralph Fiennes in The Dig, uncovered the Sutton Hoo ship?
Basil Brown
Basil Brown had already uncovered the ship when its importance became clear and a team under Cambridge's Charles Phillips took charge. Fiennes, fittingly, was born in nearby Ipswich.
Q 07Which monk landed on the Isle of Thanet in 597 and became the first Archbishop of Canterbury?
Augustine
Augustine's party considered turning back on the way and had to be urged on by letter from Rome before crossing to Kent. Within a few years he was baptising the local king.
Q 08Æthelred's byname unræd, long mistranslated as 'the Unready', actually puns on his name to mean what?
Ill-counselled
Ill-counselled is the joke: Æthel-ræd means 'noble counsel' and un-ræd 'no counsel', so the king named for good advice became the king of bad advice. The gibe is not recorded until long after his death.
Q 09What name do historians give the early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England as a group?
The Heptarchy
The Heptarchy, a rule of seven, is a tidy fiction: the number of kingdoms rose and fell, and the word itself is first recorded only in the 1570s, long after the last of them had gone.
Q 10Which third people, after the Angles and Saxons, did Bede say settled Kent and the Isle of Wight?
Jutes
The Jutes did not keep their island: Bede says the West Saxon king Cædwalla seized the Isle of Wight in 686 and set out to wipe out its people and settle his own in their place.
Q 11Bede said the Anglo-Saxons named which month Ēosturmōnaþ, after the goddess whose feast named Easter?
April
April's goddess, Ēostre, is known only from Bede, yet her name stuck: most neighbouring languages call the feast by a form of the Latin Pascha, while English kept Easter.
Q 12Which year-numbering system, devised by Dionysius Exiguus, did Bede's history of 731 help spread?
Anno Domini
Anno Domini was worked out by a monk in Rome in 525 and little used until Bede took it up; the reach of his history helped make counting from Christ's birth the norm in medieval Europe.
Q 13Place names ending in -by, such as Kirkby, Grimsby and Selby, use which language's word for a village?
Old Norse
Q 21King Oswiu ruled at which 664 synod that Northumbria would date Easter by Rome's reckoning, not Iona's?
Whitby
Whitby turned on one argument: Oswiu sided with Rome because St Peter held the keys of heaven, and he did not want to find its gates shut against him. The losing bishop, Colman, went home.
Q 22Which kingdom, converted by the exiled Wilfrid from 681, was the last major Anglo-Saxon one to turn Christian?
Sussex
Sussex was in famine when Wilfrid arrived, and he is said to have taught the South Saxons to fish before they agreed to be baptised en masse. He stayed five years.
Q 23Which landowner, played by Carey Mulligan in The Dig, owned the Sutton Hoo treasure and gave it all away?
Edith Pretty
Old Norse býr, a farm or village, left a trail of -by names across the Danelaw, and the same word survives in 'by-law', at first a town's own law.
Q 14Which title replaced 'ealdorman' for England's regional governors during Cnut's reign?
Earl
Earl never grew a feminine form, which is why an earl's wife is a countess; the older title lived on too, as the alderman of English town government.
Q 15Which silver coin, struck from the later 8th century at 240 to the pound, was Anglo-Saxon England's everyday money?
The penny
The penny stayed at 240 to the pound for some twelve centuries, until decimal coinage arrived in 1971. English pennies in Scandinavian hoards are thought to include Danegeld.
Q 16The Exeter Book, left to the cathedral by Exeter's first bishop in 1072, holds almost a hundred of what?
Riddles
Riddles, about ninety-four of them, come with no answers in the manuscript, so scholars have had to argue over some of the solutions. The same book holds The Wanderer and The Seafarer.
Q 17Bede has King Edwin's counsellor liken life to which creature's brief flight through a firelit hall?
A sparrow
A sparrow flies in out of the winter storm, crosses the warm hall and is gone into the dark again, and what came before or after, says the counsellor, we cannot know. Wordsworth later turned the image into verse.
Q 18The eyebrows, nose and moustache on the Sutton Hoo helmet combine to form which creature?
A dragon
A dragon with outstretched wings is made from the wearer's own face, and it meets a second dragon's head at the end of the helmet's crest. Conservators had to rebuild the helmet twice from rusted fragments.
Q 19Whose coffin, borne by monks who had fled Lindisfarne, finally came to rest at Durham in 995?
Cuthbert
By legend Cuthbert's wagon stuck fast on the road and the monks took it as the saint's own wish to stop there; Durham city and its cathedral grew up around his tomb.
Q 20Which grandson of Alfred took the last Viking kingdom in 927 and is counted as the first King of England?
Æthelstan
Æthelstan had to defend the title ten years later: at Brunanburh he beat a combined army of Scots and Dublin Vikings that had come to break his hold on the north.
Edith Pretty handed the whole trove to the British Museum after a treasure-trove inquest had ruled the grave goods her personal property. She had organised the excavation of the mounds on her estate herself.
Q 24Which Welsh monk from St David's, later Bishop of Sherborne, wrote the Life of King Alfred in 893?
Asser
Asser agreed to split his time between St David's and Alfred's court. The only manuscript of his Life burned in 1731, so the text survives through copies made before the fire.
Q 25Alfred's treaty with Guthrum ran the Danelaw border up the Thames, Lea and Ouse to which Roman road?
Watling Street
Watling Street closed a frontier drawn mostly by water: up the Thames and the Lea, straight across to Bedford, then along the Ouse. The line left London on Alfred's side.
Q 26Lincoln, Nottingham, Stamford and Leicester were four of the Danelaw's Five Boroughs; which town was the fifth?
Derby
Derby was the first of the five to fall back into English hands, stormed in 917 by the army of Alfred's daughter Æthelflæd; Leicester gave in without a fight the next year.
Q 27Which king's 973 coronation at Bath set the rite on which every later English coronation has been based?
Edgar
Edgar's service gave the ceremony its shape, its oath and its anthems, down to the two bishops who led him by the hand into Bath Abbey. His queen Ælfthryth was consecrated beside him, the first West Saxon queen regularly styled regina.
Q 28Which 8th-century king's dyke still roughly follows the border between England and Wales?
Offa
Offa also had a gold coin struck in imitation of an Abbasid dinar of 774, Arabic script and all, with 'Offa Rex' added in Latin. Only three of his gold coins survive.
Q 29Which pagan king of Mercia killed Oswald of Northumbria at Maserfield and died at the Winwaed in 655?
Penda
Penda stayed pagan to the end, yet Bede says he let missionaries preach in Mercia and despised only those converts who did not live by their new faith.
Q 30Which East Anglian king, one of Bede's overlords of the south, is the likeliest occupant of the Sutton Hoo ship?
Rædwald
Rædwald hedged his bets, keeping two altars in one temple, one to Christ and one to the old gods; the coins in the ship date to the 620s, matching his death around 624.