Scottish History Trivia
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50 free Scottish History trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Scotland's story is a sequence of turning points: Roman legions who built a wall and then walked away from it, kings who died in riding accidents and sieges, a queen whose marriages cost her a crown, and a parliament that voted itself out of existence in 1707 only to return almost three centuries later. This quiz goes a layer beyond the famous dates. You will meet the Picts and the early Gaelic kingdoms, the Wars of Independence after the celebrated battles, the Stewart kings, the Reformation and the Covenanters, the Union and its terms, the Jacobite risings year by year, the Clearances, the Enlightenment thinkers, industrial Glasgow and the road to devolution. It suits pub-quiz regulars, teachers building a Scottish history lesson, and anyone who wants to know what actually happened between the dates everyone remembers. Every answer comes with an explanation, so you leave knowing more than you arrived with.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Roman name Picti, first recorded in 297 for the tribes north of the Forth, is usually explained as meaning what?
Painted people
Painted people is the usual reading of Picti, from the Latin pingere, 'to paint', probably a Roman soldiers' nickname for tattooed warriors, though a native tribal name may lie behind it.
Q 02Unlike in Shakespeare, the real Macbeth killed which king in battle in 1040 rather than murdering a sleeping guest?
Duncan I
Duncan I was the aggressor rather than a sleeping guest: he died in action after marching into Moray, Macbeth's own territory. Macbeth then ruled seventeen years before his death at Lumphanan in 1057.
Q 03Malcolm III, who killed Macbeth at Lumphanan in 1057, carried the Gaelic nickname Canmore, meaning literally what?
Big head
Big head is the literal sense of ceann mòr, though it was understood as 'great chief', and the Canmore dynasty it named ruled Scotland into the thirteenth century. Malcolm's queen, Margaret, was later made a saint.
Q 04Scotland's succession crisis began in 1286 when Alexander III, hurrying to join his new queen at Kinghorn, died how?
Falling from his horse
Falling from his horse on a stormy night near the shore at Kinghorn killed Alexander III as he rode to join his new queen. His only direct heir was an infant granddaughter living abroad.
Q 05A captain from which clan led the troops lodged as guests in Glencoe before the massacre of 13 February 1692?
Campbell
Campbell was the name of Robert Campbell of Glenlyon, who commanded the troops billeted on the MacDonalds of Glencoe, and the breach of hospitality made the killings infamous. The chief had sworn his oath to William days late.
Q 06On 19 August 1745 the Young Pretender raised his standard at which spot on the shores of Loch Shiel?
Glenfinnan
Glenfinnan saw the Royal Standard raised to launch the last Jacobite rising, and within a month the rebels had taken Edinburgh.
Q 07Reached on 4 December 1745, which English town was the furthest south the Jacobite army got before turning back?
Derby
Derby was the high-water mark of the rising, and the Jacobite leaders retreated because the promised French landing and English reinforcements never appeared. The decision was taken at a council held in Exeter House the next day.
Q 08In 1746 Flora MacDonald smuggled Bonnie Prince Charlie from the Outer Hebrides to Skye by disguising him as what?
Her Irish maid
Her Irish maid, called Betty Burke, was the cover under which the prince crossed to Skye. Flora was imprisoned in the Tower of London for her part and later emigrated to North Carolina.
Q 09Which deputy to Hitler flew solo to Scotland on 10 May 1941, hoping to open peace talks through the Duke of Hamilton?
Rudolf Hess
Rudolf Hess landed by parachute, was arrested at once and spent the rest of the war in custody before his trial at Nuremberg. The Duke of Hamilton was a pioneering aviator Hess hoped would be open to talks.
Q 10On 21 June 1919 German crews scuttled their own interned High Seas Fleet at which Royal Navy anchorage in Orkney?
Scapa Flow
Scapa Flow saw most of the interned German fleet go down in a single afternoon because Admiral von Reuter feared the British would seize the ships. British guard ships managed to beach some of the rest.
Q 11Tacitus credited which Caledonian chief with 'they make a desert and call it peace' before Mons Graupius in AD 83 or 84?
Calgacus
Calgacus is known only from Tacitus's Agricola, and some historians argue the chieftain was invented to voice the writer's own politics. His name is usually taken to mean 'swordsman'.
Q 12Which turf Roman frontier, begun in AD 142 between the Forth and Clyde, was abandoned within a generation?
Antonine Wall
Antonine Wall was meant to supersede Hadrian's Wall, but by the 160s the legions had pulled back south to the older line. Its emperor, Antoninus Pius, never left Italy to see it.
Q 13In 563 Columba sailed from Ireland with twelve companions and founded the monastery on which small Hebridean island?
Iona
Q 21James II of Scotland died on 3 August 1460 while besieging English-held Roxburgh Castle, when what happened beside him?
A cannon exploded
A cannon exploded as the king, an artillery enthusiast, stood beside one of his own guns, killing him at a siege his father had attempted and failed in 1436.
Q 22James III of Scotland was killed at Sauchieburn near Stirling in June 1488, facing rebel nobles nominally led by whom?
His own son
His own son, the fifteen-year-old Duke of Rothesay, was the rebels' figurehead and succeeded as James IV. The father had already been imprisoned once by his nobles, in 1482, before being restored to power.
Q 23Henry VIII's 1540s campaign to force the infant Mary, Queen of Scots to marry his son Edward is remembered as what?
Iona was then part of the Gaelic kingdom of Dál Riata, and its monks are believed to have produced the Book of Kells in the years before 800. The island remains a place of Christian pilgrimage.
Q 14Dál Riata, the Gaelic kingdom ruled from the hillfort of Dunadd, covered which modern region plus part of Antrim?
Argyll
Argyll was the kingdom's Scottish heartland, settled in tradition by Gaels from Ireland around AD 500; in the ninth century it merged with the Pictish kingdom to form what became Scotland.
Q 15By a 1266 treaty, three years after the Battle of Largs, which kingdom ceded the Hebrides and Man to Scotland?
Norway
Norway's hold was ended less by Largs, an inconclusive fight on a storm-hit shore, than by King Haakon's death in Orkney that winter, after which his son sued for peace.
Q 16Which claimant, chosen as king by Edward I in the Great Cause of 1292, was mocked as Toom Tabard, or 'empty coat'?
John Balliol
John Balliol had the senior genealogical claim among thirteen competitors, but Edward treated him as a vassal and forced his abdication in 1296. The nickname is read as a king with no power, or as a jibe at the arms stripped from his coat.
Q 17After which defeat by Edward I on 22 July 1298 did William Wallace resign as Guardian of Scotland?
Falkirk
Falkirk broke the Scottish spear-rings with English archers, ending Wallace's spell as Guardian less than a year after his triumph at Stirling Bridge. He was captured and executed in 1305.
Q 18Robert the Bruce was excommunicated for killing his rival John Comyn in a friary church in which town in 1306?
Dumfries
Dumfries was where the two rivals met in the friars' chapel and came to blows, and six weeks later Bruce had himself inaugurated as king at Scone. The killing made peace with Comyn's powerful kin impossible.
Q 19Where was Robert the Bruce's heart finally buried after Sir James Douglas carried it towards the Holy Land in 1330?
Melrose Abbey
Melrose Abbey received the heart after Douglas, who wore its silver casket on a chain round his neck, died fighting the Moors of Granada on the way. Bruce's body lies at Dunfermline and his embalmed organs at Dumbarton.
Q 20James I of Scotland was assassinated on 20 February 1437, in a failed coup led by his uncle, in which town?
Perth
Perth's Blackfriars became a trap: James hid in a sewer, but he had recently had its outlet blocked to stop tennis balls being lost, and men acting for the Earl of Atholl killed him there.
The Rough Wooing
The Rough Wooing ended in failure when the Scots sent the five-year-old queen to France in 1548 to be raised at the French court instead. She was betrothed to the Dauphin the same year.
Q 24Weeks after Darnley's 1567 murder at Kirk o' Field, Mary, Queen of Scots married which nobleman widely blamed for it?
The Earl of Bothwell
The Earl of Bothwell was acquitted of the murder at trial, but the marriage provoked the rising that cost Mary her throne. He fled, was imprisoned in Denmark and died at Dragsholm Castle in 1578.
Q 25Eleven days after escaping Lochleven Castle in May 1568, Mary, Queen of Scots lost which battle and fled to England?
Langside
Langside was where Mary's 6,000 men were beaten by the smaller force of her half-brother the Earl of Moray, regent for her infant son. She crossed into England within days and never returned.
Q 26Scotland dropped 25 March as New Year's Day in 1600, but England's later switch explains the odd start date of what?
The tax year
The tax year still ends on 5 April, which is 25 March, England's old New Year, plus the eleven days Britain skipped in September 1752.
Q 27After a French fleet took St Andrews Castle in 1547, the reformer John Knox spent nineteen months doing what?
Rowing as a galley slave
Rowing as a galley slave, chained to a bench in the French fleet, was Knox's punishment for serving as chaplain to the castle's Protestant garrison. Freed early in 1549, he went to preach in England.
Q 28James VI, who took a personal part in the 1590 North Berwick witch trials, wrote which 1597 treatise endorsing witch-hunting?
Daemonologie
Daemonologie was written partly to answer sceptics like Reginald Scot, whose book had mocked the whole idea of witchcraft, and it was reprinted when James took the English throne in 1603.
Q 29How did market-trader Jenny Geddes reputedly protest the new prayer book in St Giles', Edinburgh, on 23 July 1637?
Throwing a stool
Throwing a stool at the head of the dean reading the service set off riots that spread across Scotland and led within a year to the National Covenant. Robert Burns later named his mare after her.
Q 30Where were the Honours of Scotland hidden from Cromwell's army in 1651, before being smuggled out to a village church?
Dunnottar Castle
Dunnottar Castle, a clifftop fortress near Stonehaven, held the regalia through an eight-month siege; in one telling a minister's wife carried them out, and they lay buried under Kinneff's church floor until 1660.