The Puritans
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50 free The Puritans trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Puritans are easy to caricature and hard to pin down. They began as reformers inside the Church of England who thought the Reformation had not gone far enough, and within a century they had fought a civil war, crossed an ocean and built a new society in America. Along the way they left their mark on schools, local government, literature and the way people still talk about hard work and strict morals. This quiz covers the whole story on both sides of the Atlantic. Expect questions on what Puritans believed and how they worshipped, the rulers they clashed with in England, the ministers, dissenters and poets of early New England, the witch trials of 1692, and the small details of everyday life, from long sermons to what was banned and why. Some of the answers overturn the popular picture, which owes more to later novels and plays than to the record. It is written for history students revising colonial America or Stuart England, teachers who want a ready-made classroom round, and trivia hosts planning a themed evening. The early questions are the gentlest and the later ones reward real enthusiasts, and every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which holiday did Puritan leaders in Boston outlaw in 1659, with a five-shilling fine for anyone caught celebrating?
Christmas
Christmas struck Puritans as a Catholic invention, and the ban stood until 1681. Boston went on ignoring the day for generations, and it only became fashionable there in the mid-1800s.
Q 02Despite the popular image of burning at the stake, how did nineteen people convicted in the Salem witch trials die?
Hanging
Hanging killed all nineteen, fourteen women and five men. The idea that American witches were burned is a later myth, though one more man died under torture after refusing to enter a plea.
Q 03Which college did Massachusetts Puritans found in 1636 to train ministers, now the oldest in the United States?
Harvard
Harvard was named for a Puritan clergyman who, on his deathbed, left the new college £780 and his library of several hundred books. He was its first benefactor, not its founder.
Q 04Which Hawthorne novel set in Puritan Boston follows Hester Prynne, forced to wear a badge of shame for adultery?
The Scarlet Letter
The Scarlet Letter is set in the 1640s, two centuries before Hawthorne wrote it. Hester's sentence is three hours on the scaffold and a lifetime wearing an embroidered red A.
Q 05Which Puritan general ruled England as Lord Protector in the 1650s and turned down Parliament's offer of the crown?
Oliver Cromwell
Oliver Cromwell agonised for six weeks over the crown before deciding that God had spoken against the office of king. He was sworn in as Lord Protector in plain black clothing instead of royal regalia.
Q 06Which governor, long credited with the "city upon a hill" sermon, led the Puritan fleet to Massachusetts in 1630?
John Winthrop
John Winthrop served as governor for 12 of the colony's first 20 years. The sermon lay forgotten for nearly two hundred years until it was printed in the 1830s, and presidents have quoted its phrase since.
Q 07Which Arthur Miller play used the Salem witch trials as an allegory for the anti-communist hunts of the 1950s?
The Crucible
The Crucible opened on Broadway in January 1953 and won that year's Tony Award for Best Play. Three years later Miller himself was questioned by the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
Q 08Which minister, expelled by Massachusetts Puritan leaders, founded Providence as a refuge for liberty of conscience?
Roger Williams
Roger Williams argued for a full separation of church and state, a shocking idea to his neighbours. In 1638 he also founded the First Baptist Church in America, though he stayed a Baptist only briefly.
Q 09Which places of entertainment did England's Parliament, urged on by Puritans, order closed across London in 1642?
Theatres
Theatres stayed dark for eighteen years, until the monarchy returned in 1660. Shakespeare's Globe did not outlast the ban: it was demolished while the playhouses were shut.
Q 10Which colony, founded by the Pilgrims in 1620, was merged into its bigger Puritan neighbour Massachusetts in 1691?
Plymouth
Plymouth was the older colony but much the smaller. Its Pilgrims were Separatists who had quit the Church of England outright, while most Puritans hoped to reform that church from within.
Q 11Under which monarch did the Puritan movement emerge, demanding more reform than the church settlement of 1559 allowed?
Elizabeth I
Elizabeth I kept bishops, clerical vestments and a set prayer book, which Puritans saw as leftovers of Catholicism. They never used the name Puritan themselves: it began as an insult.
Q 12Which French-born Protestant reformer wrote the theology that English Puritans followed on grace, sin and salvation?
John Calvin
John Calvin taught in a Swiss city that sheltered English Protestant exiles during the 1550s. Those exiles came home with his ideas and formed the core of the early Puritans.
Q 13Which doctrine left Puritans anxiously searching their own lives for signs that they were among God's elect?
Q 21Which translation of scripture, favoured by Puritans and carried on the Mayflower, was known for pointed margin notes?
Geneva Bible
The Geneva Bible was the primary Bible of late 16th-century English Protestants, and Shakespeare used it too. It is nicknamed the Breeches Bible, after the garments it says Adam and Eve sewed from fig leaves.
Q 22What name do historians give the movement of roughly 20,000 English Puritans to New England, mostly in the 1630s?
The Great Migration
The Great Migration dropped off sharply once Parliament was recalled in 1640. By one estimate, 7 to 10 percent of the colonists then sailed back to England, including about a third of the clergymen.
Q 23Which colony did the minister Thomas Hooker found after falling out with the Puritan leaders of Massachusetts?
Predestination
Predestination held that God had already destined some people for salvation and the rest for Hell. Some Puritans kept detailed records of their own behaviour, looking for proof of which they were.
Q 14Which Boston midwife did Puritan leaders banish in 1637 after her religious meetings at home drew large crowds?
Anne Hutchinson
Anne Hutchinson's weekly gatherings grew so popular that the colony's young governor attended. After her banishment she moved on to New Netherland, where she was killed five years later.
Q 15Members of which religious group, including Mary Dyer, did Puritan Massachusetts put to death between 1659 and 1661?
Quakers
Quakers were banished on pain of death under a law passed at the end of 1658, and four who defied it were killed. The executions ended in 1661, when the king forbade Massachusetts to kill anyone for the faith.
Q 16Which Bible translation was commissioned after Puritan John Rainolds proposed it at the 1604 Hampton Court Conference?
King James Version
The King James Version appeared in 1611, seven years after the conference. It was the main thing the Puritans gained: the monarch rebuked them and rejected their requests to change church services.
Q 17Which king, who clashed for years with Puritans in Parliament, was tried for high treason and beheaded in January 1649?
Charles I
Charles I had ruled for eleven years without calling a Parliament at all. He died in one clean stroke on a scaffold put up in front of the Banqueting House in Whitehall.
Q 18Which nickname for Parliament's Civil War supporters mocked the closely cropped hair worn by some Puritans?
Roundheads
Roundheads was a term of derision, and plenty of Puritans did not fit it. After an archbishop ordered clergy to wear short hair in 1636, many grew theirs longer out of contempt for him.
Q 19What name is given to rules restricting Sunday trade and leisure, a term a 1781 book applied to strict Puritan codes?
Blue laws
Blue laws were described in a 1781 book now regarded as unreliable and probably satirical. The story that they were printed on blue paper is widely told, but the term's true origin remains a mystery.
Q 20Which university, where many early Puritan leaders studied, gave its name to a Massachusetts town in 1638?
Cambridge
Cambridge was an important centre of Puritan theology, and the town's ministers and first schoolmaster were all alumni. Until the renaming, the settlement had been known simply as Newtowne.
Connecticut
Connecticut remembers Hooker as its father. In a 1638 sermon at Hartford he declared that the foundation of authority lies in the free consent of the people.
Q 24What was the first volume printed in British North America, produced by Massachusetts Puritans on a new press in 1640?
Bay Psalm Book
The Bay Psalm Book set the psalms to metre so that congregations could sing them. One of eleven known surviving first editions sold in 2013 for $14.2 million, then a record for a printed book.
Q 25Which Puritan poet of Massachusetts had her verses published in London in 1650 as The Tenth Muse?
Anne Bradstreet
Anne Bradstreet did not take the poems to a printer herself: her brother-in-law carried the manuscript to London. She is remembered as America's first published poet.
Q 26Which Boston Puritan minister championed smallpox inoculation in 1721, having learned of it from a slave named Onesimus?
Cotton Mather
Cotton Mather's campaign caused violent controversy in Boston during the 1721 outbreak. A young Benjamin Franklin took part in the opposition, yet later called one of Mather's books a major influence on his life.
Q 27Which Puritan preacher, jailed for twelve years for refusing to give up preaching, wrote The Pilgrim's Progress?
John Bunyan
John Bunyan had been a tinker, mending pots and pans, before he took to the pulpit. His allegory became one of the most published books in English, with 1,300 editions printed by 1938.
Q 28Which Puritan poet served the Commonwealth as Secretary for Foreign Tongues and dictated Paradise Lost when blind?
John Milton
John Milton was totally blind by 1652, so he dictated his epic to helpers. In his government post a fellow poet, Andrew Marvell, served as his deputy from 1657.
Q 29What name did New England Puritans give the plain building used for both Sunday worship and town business?
Meeting house
Meeting house suits the building's double life: it was paid for with tax money and hosted local debates as well as sermons. Inside there were no statues, stained glass or crosses.
Q 30Which German sociologist argued that Puritan ethics, with their devotion to hard work, helped give rise to capitalism?
Max Weber
Max Weber made the case in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In 1998 the International Sociological Association ranked it the fourth most important sociological book of the 20th century.