Lesson Y7-U05-L01

Y7-U05-L01 Life in a Medieval Village Quiz: KS3 History, Unit 5

20 questions

Written by Revision Ninja · Last reviewed 11 October 2026

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Lesson Y7-U05-L01, Life in a Medieval Village: 20 multiple choice questions for the KS3 History (National Curriculum), Unit 5: Year 7: Medieval Lives, written with Revision Ninja.

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The 20 questions

  1. What was the name for a village and the land around it, run by a lord?

    • A parish
    • A charter
    • A manor
    • A borough

  2. Roughly how many people in England were peasants after 1066?

    • About one in ten people
    • About nine in every ten people
    • About nine in every hundred people
    • About one in two people

  3. What were the main buildings at the centre of a medieval manor?

    • The town market and the castle keep
    • The manor house and the parish church
    • The mill and the blacksmith's forge
    • The monastery and the tithe barn

  4. What were medieval peasant cottages usually made of?

    • Wood, mud and straw
    • Stone and slate tiles from quarries
    • Brick and glass with wooden doors
    • Marble and iron with stone roofs

  5. What did a manor grow or make nearly everything it needed from?

    • Supplies sent from the Pope in Rome
    • Goods brought in from Normandy each year
    • Trade with merchants in distant towns
    • Its own land, fields and woodland

  6. What was the purpose of the open field system?

    • To keep sheep and cattle out of the crops at all times
    • To build a wall around the village for defence
    • To share out the land so each family had strips in the fields
    • To separate the lord's land from the peasants' land

  7. In the three-field system, what was left fallow each year?

    • The field where the church tithes were stored
    • The field with the winter wheat, to be ploughed
    • One field, to rest and let animals graze
    • The field used for the manor house gardens

  8. Why did the medieval farmers rest one field each year?

    • To store the harvest from the other two fields in the barns
    • To make room for a new church or a mill to be built
    • To keep the soil fertile without any fertiliser from a shop
    • To let the field grow wild for hunting by the lord

  9. What was the main food grown in the winter field?

    • Wheat or rye, which made bread
    • Rice grown in flooded fields by the river
    • Sugar cane brought by traders from Spain
    • Potatoes and carrots from the Americas

  10. In a three-field system, what happens to the fields each year?

    • They are split into smaller pieces for each peasant family
    • They are sold to the lord and replaced with new fields
    • They rotate, so each field takes its turn to rest
    • They are flooded by the river so that the soil is washed

  11. What did a peasant owe the lord in labour service?

    • Seven days a week working in the lord's kitchen
    • Two to three days a week farming the lord's own land for free
    • Ten days a year fighting in the lord's army in France
    • One day a year to repair the lord's castle walls

  12. What was a tithe?

    • A payment of one penny for every animal, paid to the village
    • One tenth of everything a peasant grew or made, paid to the Church
    • One fifth of everything a peasant grew, paid to the lord
    • One tenth of the land a peasant owned, paid to the king

  13. Why could a serf not leave the manor?

    • Serfs were in prison for their crimes against the Church
    • Serfs were tied to the lord and needed his permission to leave or marry
    • Serfs were too sick to travel because of the Black Death
    • Serfs had signed a contract to fight for the lord for life

  14. Which of these did a peasant have to pay the lord, besides labour?

    • A tax for each window in the cottage, paid to the king's officers every single year
    • Rent and fines, including a fine to marry or to grind corn at the lord's mill
    • A payment for each sheep to the Church every summer as a gift to the local parish priest
    • A fee to sail the River Thames to London each season for the right to trade in the city

  15. Which two masters did a peasant owe work, crops and money to?

    • The barons and the knights
    • The king and the Pope
    • The Witan and the Danelaw
    • The lord and the Church

  16. What did the lord's demesne mean?

    • The part of the manor that the lord farmed himself using peasant labour
    • The forest that the king kept for hunting deer and boar
    • The Church's land where tithes were collected each harvest
    • The strip of land peasants were allowed to keep for their own use

  17. Why was the three-field system a clever way of farming?

    • It let peasants sell their land to the lord each year for profit
    • It meant every peasant grew only wheat so the lord could sell it
    • It allowed the Church to take over every field in the village
    • It kept the soil fertile for hundreds of years without modern chemicals

  18. Why did animals grazing on a fallow field help the soil?

    • Their meat was sold to pay for the lord's taxes at the market
    • Their hooves made the soil lighter and cleaner for the plough
    • Their noise frightened away the crows that ate the seed
    • Their dung put nutrients back into the soil naturally

  19. Which crop was grown in the spring field?

    • Cotton imported from abroad for the lord's household
    • Wheat or rye, which was ground into bread
    • Spring crops such as barley, oats or peas
    • Grapes grown on the south-facing slopes of the manor

  20. Who ran a manor and collected rent from the peasants?

    • The king's sheriff
    • The village priest
    • The lord
    • The bishop

All KS3 History quizzes