1066 and All That Quotes
1066 and All That was a hugely successful parody of school history textbooks first published serially in Punch but later in book form in 1930 by Methuen Publishing Ltd. The authors were W. C. Sellar (1898–1951) and R. J. Yeatman (1897–1968), who met while at Oriel College, Oxford after the First World War.
Notable Passages
“Williamanmary: England Ruled by an Orange”
“N.B. - Do not attempt to answer more than one question at a time.”
“A Bad Thing
America was thus clearly top nation, and History came to a .”
“N.B. - Do not on any account attempt to write on both sides of the paper at once.”
“Shortly after this the cruel Queen died and a post-mortem examination revealed the word 'CALLOUS' engraved on her heart.”
“A Memorable History of England,
comprising all the parts you can remember,
including 103 Good Things,
5 Bad Kings, and
2 Genuine Dates”
“William next invented a system according to which everybody had to belong to someone else, and everybody else to the King. This was called the Feutile System [...]”
“Gladstone...spent his declining years trying to guess the answer to the Irish Question; unfortunately, whenever he was getting warm, the Irish secretly changed the Question[.]”
“The War with the Americans is memorable as being the only war in which the English were ever defeated, and it was unfair because the Americans had the Allies on their side.”
“The Rebels were ferociously dealt with by the memorable Judge Jeffreys who was sent out by James as a Justice in Ire in the West, where he made some furious remarks about the prisoners, known as 'The Bloody Asides.'”
“The last event in Queen Victoria's reign was the Borewore, or, more correctly, Boerwoer (Dutch), which was fought against a very tiresome Dutch tribe called the Bores, because they were left over from all previous wars.”
“Henry VII was very good at answering the Irish Question, and made a Law called Poyning's Law by which the Irish could have a Parliament of their own, but the English were to pass all the Acts in it. This was obviously a very Good Thing.”
“Simon de Montfort's Good Idea
Simon de Montfort's Idea was to make the Parliament more Representative by inviting one or two vergers, or vergesses, to come from every parish, thus causing the only Good Parliament in History.”
“With the ascension of Charles I to the throne we come at last to the Central Period of English History (not to be confused with the Middle Ages, of course), consisting in the utterly memorable Struggle between the Cavaliers (Wrong but Wromantic) and the Roundheads (Right but Repulsive).”
“Noticing some fair-haired children in the slave market one morning, Pope Gregory, the memorable pope, said (in Latin), 'What are those?' and on being told that they were Angels, made the memorable joke – ' Non Angli, sed Angeli ' (' not Angels, but Anglicans ') and commanded one of his saints called St Augustine to go and convert the rest.”