Why are they sending me to Hastings? Quiz

Answer: Senlac Hill

Senlac Hill lies just over 6 miles northwest of Hastings. It is close to the modern-day town of Battle in East Sussex, England. The English army led by King Harold II were defeated in battle by William of Normandy and his army.

There is also a common misconception that the battle was won through a devious tactic of luring the English down from their advantage point on top of the hill by pretending to retreat. This is actually not the case - in fact, William's army retreated following a heavy attack in which they had lost many of their men. When William's horse was killed from under him and many Normans thought that he was dead, they retreated down the hill. The English, thinking that they had won, ran down the hill and lost their vantage point. William was then able to rally his troops for a final attack.

Recently, John Grehan has claimed that the battle actually took place on the steeper Caldbec Hill, though this claim has not been confirmed.

Answer: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rosseau, in his famous book "Confessions" (completed in 1769 but first published in 1782), wrote that "a great princess" uttered the eponymous "let them eat cake" line. This was later attributed to Marie Antoinette, but it could not have been her. At the time the book was completed, she was 14 and had not yet arrived in France.

In fact, the claim that Marie-Antoinette said "Let them eat cake [actually 'brioche']" first appeared in print in 1843 in a book by journalist and novelist Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr!

To cap it all, there are various much earlier allegations about princesses and queens making comparable callous remarks.

Answer: Canute the Great

The dates are uncertain, but Canute ruled Sweden, Norway, Denmark and England from around 995 to 1035.

If he did try to reverse the tide it is likely that he did so in order to prove the point that no man can control everything, but it is unknown whether this is the case. However, the phrase 'King Canute and the waves' has established itself in British English in the sense of 'trying to resist the inevitable'.

Canute died in England in 1035 and was buried at Winchester.

Answer: 10

Although the Confederacy at the height of the Civil War comprised 11 formally seceded states, two less formally seceded states and one territory, by the time the Emancipation Proclamation was signed only 10 states were deemed to still be "in rebellion" (Tennessee had already mostly been returned to Union control by this time) and it was only to those states that the proclamation applied.

The Empancipation Proclamation itself did not, therefore, absolish slavery within the USA, but rather just required that the US Executive Branch treat as freed all the slaves within those 10 states. Slaves in other states (including Union) remained unfreed. Slavery remained techincally legal until the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 which rendered slavery illegal in the USA.

Answer: They were actually painted bright colors.

Paint pigments have been found on Roman and Greek statues since the nineteenth century. Historians can now replicate the colours of the statues from these residues (where possible) and have indicated that they were brightly coloured and often realistically painted. Colour was never considered an essential part of beauty by the Romans and the Greeks, which possibly explains why they were never repainted.

Answer: 4

Only four suicides were recorded between Black Thursday and 31 December 1929 as having been linked to the Crash. Only two of these suicides took place on Wall Street itself, dispelling the myth than large numbers of bankers and stockbrokers threw themselves off the tops of buildings, as soon as the crash happened.

Whilst further Crash-related suicides will have happened later, or at the time but without knowledge of the reasons, there was certainly not a mass suicide endemic as has often been portrayed by modern media.

Answer: They wore helmets with horns on them.

There are no records of the horned helmets we associate with the Vikings having ever existed. All depictions of Viking helmets dating to that age show helmets with no horns, and the only authentic Viking helmet that has ever been found does not have them either.

It is possible that the horns were added in medieval legends in order to make the Vikings seem satanic, or that there was some confusion as to the identity of the wings found on the Viking god Thor's helmet.

Answer: Columbus had grossly underestimated the distance he would need to travel and his proposal was rejected as impractical.

Westerners had known that the earth was spherical by around 300 BC. The actual reason for Columbus' inability to find quick funding for his voyage was the fact that he had completely miscalculated the distance of the voyage - and had he not landed in the Americas when he did, he would have run out of supplies very quickly.

The majority of those he approached for funding did not believe his calculations and therefore refused to fund a voyage they deemed to be doomed.

Answer: One of the lead excavators died of an infected mosquito bite soon after its discovery, leading journalists to create the curse story.

The tomb of Tutankhamun was discovered in 1922 by a British team led by Howard Carter and the 5th Earl of Carnarvon. On 25 March 1923, Carnarvon died in Cairo following blood poisoning caused by an infected severe mosquito bite that he had accidentally shaved over with a razor. Journalists jumped on the chance to sensationalise the story, asserting that his death was the result of a curse.

Howard Carter died of lymphoma in London many years later (1939) at the age of 64, suggesting that the story about the curse is ludicrous.

Answer: The violin was invented hundreds of years later than the Great Fire of Rome.

The Great Fire of Rome happened in July 64 AD. According to the misconception that many believe, Nero continued to play his violin whilst Rome burned to the ground, before using the cleared land to build a new palace. The myth arises from a contemporary account by Suetonius and Cassius Dio that said that Nero sang the "Sack of Ilium" in stage costume while the city burned. However, other accounts from the time show that nero was not even in Rome at the time of the fire.

According to the contemporary Tacitus, Nero rushed straight back to Rome upon hearing ofthe fire, before opening his palaces to the homeless and rebuilding the city quickly and safely.

Although the lyre had been invited by this time, "fiddling" is not a verb that would be used to refer to its playing as the terms was not coined until the middle ages. The violin (fiddle) was invented in the 16th century!