Board: OCR | Unit: Y106 | Component: 1 (British Period Study)
About this option
England 1485–1558: the Early Tudors covers the establishment and consolidation of the Tudor dynasty from Henry VII’s victory at Bosworth to the death of Mary I. Students trace the reconstructionReconstruction
Full Description:The period immediately following the Civil War (1865–1877) when the federal government attempted to integrate formerly enslaved people into society. Its premature end and the subsequent rollback of rights necessitated the Civil Rights Movement a century later. Reconstruction saw the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and the election of Black politicians across the South. However, it ended with the withdrawal of federal troops and the rise of Jim Crow. The Civil Rights Movement is often described as the “Second Reconstruction,” an attempt to finish the work that was abandoned in 1877.
Critical Perspective:Understanding Reconstruction is essential to understanding the Civil Rights Movement. It provides the historical lesson that legal rights are fragile and temporary without federal enforcement. The “failure” of Reconstruction was not due to Black incapacity, but to a lack of national political will to defend Black rights against white violence—a dynamic that activists in the 1960s were determined not to repeat.
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Edit Entry of royal authority after the Wars of the Roses, the transformation of the English Church under Henry VIII, the political crises of the mid-Tudor period, and the contested religious settlements of Edward VI and Mary. The option requires breadth across more than seventy years of dramatic change in politics, religion, and government.
Key themes
- Henry VII: the consolidation of Tudor power, the management of the nobility, financial policy, and the securing of the dynasty
- Henry VIII’s early reign: Wolsey’s dominance, foreign policy ambitions, and the management of government
- The Break with Rome: causes, the Royal Supremacy, the dissolution of the monasteries, and the Henrician Reformation
- Thomas Cromwell: the revolution in government debate and the transformation of royal administration
- The reign of Edward VI: the Protestant Reformation under Somerset and Northumberland, the Prayer Books, and the limits of Protestant advance
- The reign of Mary I: the Catholic restoration, the Spanish marriage, Marian persecution, and the question of Mary’s failure
- The nature of early Tudor government: the role of the Council, Parliament, and the localities
What the exam asks
Y106 is a period study. Questions require breadth across the full chronological range, assessing change and the ability to make comparisons across different phases of the period. Students are expected to demonstrate precise factual knowledge and to sustain arguments across the whole option rather than focusing narrowly on individual events.
Historiography
Early Tudor history has generated some of the most influential debates in English historiography:
- The motives for the Break with Rome: personal dynastic crisis or principled religious and political conviction? The long debate over Henry VIII’s relationship to Protestant reform
- Thomas Cromwell and the ‘Tudor revolution in government’: G. R. Elton’s thesis that Cromwell created a modern bureaucratic state, and the substantial revisionist challenge to this (Penry Williams, David Starkey)
- The dissolution of the monasteries: fiscal opportunism, religious conviction, or a calculated redistribution of power to the gentry?
- The reign of Mary I: a tragic failure or a serious attempt at Catholic restoration that was simply overtaken by events? The revisionist case made by Eamon Duffy and others for taking Marian Catholicism seriously
Interpretations pack — coming September 2026
A teaching pack for this option is in development, covering all core historiographical debates. It will include named historians with argument summaries, paired comparison tasks built to OCR mark scheme logic, and provenance analysis prompts — all in a downloadable PDF.
£9.99 per pack · Available September 2026
