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This lesson is the heart of the unit's assessed source skill. Unit Y106 is examined in two parts, and Section A is a source enquiry: a set of four contemporary written sources on a defined topic, which you must evaluate to reach a judgement about how far they support a given interpretation. That defined topic — the OCR Y106 set enquiry — is the Mid-Tudor Crises of 1547–1558, the very period whose politics and religion the previous two lessons examined. This lesson brings the historical content of Edward's and Mary's reigns together with the source-critical technique the enquiry demands, so that you can both understand the mid-Tudor crises and evaluate contemporary sources about them to the standard Section A rewards.
The lesson does three things. First, it sets out the historical context of the mid-Tudor crises — not as fresh narrative (you have that from Lessons 7 and 8) but as the interpretive debate that gives the enquiry its point: was there really a "mid-Tudor crisis" at all? This is the question the sources are used to test, and understanding the debate is what allows you to contextualise a source and to judge how far it supports a given view. Second, it explains how the Section A enquiry works — the exact nature of the AO2 task, and above all the discipline of judging each source by its provenance, tone, purpose, and context rather than by the crude and misleading yardstick of "reliable" or "unreliable." Third, it offers a worked enquiry: four representative contemporary source-types on the mid-Tudor crises, each framed for teaching, and a model of how a strong answer cross-uses all four to reach a judgement.
Everything in this lesson serves the AO2 skill, and that skill is transferable: it is the same discipline of source evaluation that the "Working with Sources" sections of every earlier lesson have rehearsed on the sources of Henry VII's and Henry VIII's reigns. The difference is that here the skill is the whole task, assessed directly on a defined body of four sources, and here you must not only evaluate each source but synthesise the four into a single, weighed judgement about how far, taken together, they support the interpretation the question sets.
The organising question of the lesson is twofold. As history: was there a genuine "mid-Tudor crisis" in 1547–1558 — a systemic breakdown of government, religion, economy, and foreign policy — or a difficult but survivable interlude weathered by a resilient state? As technique: how do you weigh a set of four contemporary sources to judge how far they support such an interpretation, without falling into the trap of treating them as simply true or false? The two questions are inseparable, because you cannot evaluate a source on the mid-Tudor crises without knowing the debate it speaks to, and you cannot resolve the debate without weighing the sources.
By the end of this lesson you will be able to:
This lesson belongs to OCR H505 Unit Y106 (British period study and enquiry): England 1485–1558 — The Early Tudors, and it addresses the unit's Section A source enquiry (AO2) directly. Section A of Unit Y106 is an enquiry assessed on a set of four contemporary written sources on a defined topic — the Mid-Tudor Crises of 1547–1558 — in which you evaluate how far the sources, taken together, support a given interpretation, judging each by its provenance, tone, purpose, and context. This lesson is therefore the heart of the AO2 skill for the whole unit: where every earlier lesson has rehearsed source evaluation on a single representative type as transferable practice, this lesson trains the full, assessed enquiry on the set topic itself. Within our own teaching sequence it follows the two content lessons on Edward VI and Mary I, so that the historical context needed to contextualise the sources is already in place; this is our pedagogical arrangement, not a transcription of the specification's order. (Refer to the official OCR specification for exact wording.)
Because Section A is assessed on contemporary sources within their historical context, the lesson insists throughout on the discipline of using knowledge to situate a source — to explain why it says what it says, and what its saying it reveals — rather than merely to confirm or contradict its claims.
The interpretation that the Section A enquiry most often invites you to test is the idea of a "mid-Tudor crisis" — and you cannot evaluate the sources without understanding the debate. The eleven years from Henry VIII's death in January 1547 to Elizabeth I's accession in November 1558 were long dismissed as the troubled trough of the Tudor century: a period of weak rulers, fractured government, lurching religious reversals, economic distress, and serious popular rebellion. Two monarchs ruled in these years — the boy-king Edward VI, who died before his majority, and Mary I, England's first crowned queen regnant, whose Catholic restoration and burning of Protestants earned her the enduring soubriquet "Bloody Mary." Real power lay first with two successive quasi-regents, the Dukes of Somerset and Northumberland, and the state religion swung violently: from the conservative Catholicism of Henry's last years, to the radical Protestantism of Edward's, to the restored Roman Catholicism of Mary's.
The concept of a "mid-Tudor crisis" gathers these difficulties into a single thesis: that in these years the Tudor state came close to a systemic breakdown across every dimension of its life. The elements of the "crisis" reading are worth setting out precisely, because they are what the sources are used to test:
| Dimension | The "crisis" case |
|---|---|
| Political | Unstable minority and female government; two quasi-regents; factional coups (Somerset's fall, Northumberland's rise, the Jane Grey attempt); the perceived weakness of rule by a child and by a woman |
| Religious | Violent alternation — Catholic to Protestant to Catholic — creating confusion, division, and resistance; the imposition of change on a reluctant people; the Marian persecutions |
| Economic and social | Inflation and the debasement of the coinage inherited from Henry's wars; enclosure and agrarian distress; the serious rebellions of 1549 (the Western Rising and Kett's) |
| Foreign policy | Ruinous and fruitless wars in Scotland; the humiliating loss of Calais in 1558; the perception of subordination to Spain through the Marian marriage |
The older interpretation, associated with a tradition of mid-twentieth-century scholarship, took these difficulties at something close to face value and read them as a genuine, multi-dimensional crisis — a period in which the strains on the Tudor state, accumulating across politics, religion, economy, and foreign policy, amounted to a systemic emergency from which the realm emerged only with the stability of the Elizabethan settlement. On this "crisis" reading, the mid-Tudor years were the near-breakdown of the Tudor achievement, a trough between the consolidation under the early Tudors and the triumph under Elizabeth. This is sometimes connected to the wider argument, associated with G.R. Elton and others of his generation, that the mid-century saw a genuine crisis of the state that only the Elizabethan regime finally resolved — the "crisis" thesis in its strongest form.
Against this, a powerful revisionist current — associated above all with Jennifer Loach and David Loades, and reinforced by the work of historians such as Robert Tittler and Dale Hoak — has argued that "crisis" is a serious overstatement, at least as a description of the state. The revisionist case runs as follows. The institutions of central government continued to function throughout: Parliament met and legislated normally, the administrative machinery kept running, and the business of government went on. Both the Edwardian and the Marian regimes pursued genuine and competent reform — Northumberland restored the coinage and reformed the revenue courts, and Mary's government pursued naval and fiscal reform such as the Book of Rates of 1558 that Elizabeth inherited. Above all, the succession passed three times in eleven years — Edward to (attempted) Jane to Mary to Elizabeth — without civil war, and in 1553 an attempted usurpation backed by the head of government collapsed in nine days because the country rallied to the legitimate heir. A state whose institutions function, whose regimes reform, and whose succession passes intact three times over — including the defeat of a backed coup — is not, on this reading, a state in systemic breakdown. David Loades in particular offered a measured version of this position: the difficulties were real and should not be minimised, but they should not be exaggerated into a "crisis," for government functioned and both regimes faced inherited problems not of their own making. Jennifer Loach pressed the case for the effectiveness and normality of Edwardian government especially hard.
The most persuasive modern resolution of the debate is to disaggregate the concept of "crisis" — to ask not whether there was a crisis in general but in which dimension, and to what degree. On this approach, the evidence points in opposite directions depending on which aspect is examined. In government and the succession, the revisionist case is strong: the institutions functioned, the regimes reformed, and the succession passed intact — there was no political collapse. In religion, however, the "crisis" reading has real force: the violent alternation Protestant–Catholic–Protestant, the rebellions of 1549, and the Marian burnings produced exactly the confusion and division that a confessional crisis implies — and Diarmaid MacCulloch has argued that the real crisis of the mid-Tudor years was religious, a crisis of confessional identity that only the durability of the Elizabethan settlement finally resolved. The economic dimension lies between: there was genuine distress from inflation and debasement, but also corrective reform. The best judgement, then, is that "crisis" overstates the political condition of the realm — government did not break down — while capturing the religious upheaval: the period is best characterised not as systemic collapse but as acute religious turmoil weathered by a resilient state. This disaggregated framing is exactly what allows you to evaluate a set of sources intelligently, because it lets you ask, of each source, which dimension of the alleged crisis it speaks to, and how far it supports or qualifies the claim in that dimension.
The Section A task is an exercise in the historical evaluation of contemporary sources, and understanding exactly what it asks — and what it does not ask — is the first step to doing it well. You are given a set of four contemporary written sources on the mid-Tudor crises, and an interpretation to test — typically a statement of a view, which you must assess for how far the sources, taken together, support it. Your task is to reach a judgement about that view, grounded in a critical evaluation of all four sources.
The single most important principle is this: you are not asked whether the sources are "reliable" or "unreliable." The reliable/unreliable binary is the commonest and most damaging error in source work, and it must be unlearned. A source is not a witness in a courtroom to be believed or disbelieved; it is a piece of evidence to be interpreted, and even a wildly partisan, inaccurate, or self-serving source can be extremely valuable evidence — of the attitudes, purposes, and circumstances of the person or body that produced it. Foxe's martyrology is "unreliable" as a neutral account of Mary's motives, but it is superb evidence of how the Protestant cause wished the reign to be remembered. A rebel petition may misrepresent the rebels' full motives, but it is excellent evidence of how a rising chose to justify itself. The question is never "is this true?" but "what is this good evidence for?" — and the answer depends on reading the source critically for what it is.
That critical reading proceeds through four linked considerations, which together make up the core AO2 discipline:
| Consideration | The question it asks | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Provenance | Who produced this source, when, and in what capacity? Is it a private letter, an official minute, a public manifesto, a printed book? | The nature and origin of a source shape what it can and cannot tell us; an official record and a private letter are different kinds of evidence |
| Tone | In what register is it written — measured, outraged, celebratory, petitionary, apologetic? | Tone reveals the stance and the intended effect of a source, and often its purpose; a tone of horror or of studied neutrality is itself evidence |
| Purpose | Why was it produced? To record, to persuade, to justify, to inform, to memorialise, to incriminate? | Purpose is the key to reading a source against the grain: a source produced to justify a policy is evidence of the justification as much as of the reality |
| Context | What circumstances produced it, and how do they shape it? What was happening when it was written, and for whom? | A source can only be understood within its moment; the same claim means different things in different contexts, and knowledge is what supplies the context |
The crucial move that raises source evaluation from the mechanical to the genuinely historical is to use these four considerations together, and to read the source against the grain — to ask not only what it says but what its saying it, in that way, for that purpose, in that context, reveals. A privy-council minute that records a decision in flat, procedural language reveals, by its very neutrality, the regime's wish to present itself as orderly and in control. A rebel petition that frames a rising as a loyal appeal against evil counsellors reveals the conventions of a political culture in which even rebellion had to present itself as loyalty. The evidence is often as much in the manner and purpose of a source as in its overt content — and it is precisely this reading against the grain that provenance, tone, purpose, and context make possible.
Finally, Section A requires synthesis. You are not evaluating four sources in isolation but weighing them together to reach a judgement about how far, taken as a set, they support the interpretation. This means cross-using the sources: setting them against one another, noticing where they corroborate and where they conflict, using the strengths of one to test the claims of another, and building from the whole set a single, weighed conclusion. A source that supports the "crisis" view must be weighed against one that qualifies it; a source's partisan purpose must be set against a more disinterested one; and the final judgement must reflect the balance of the whole body of evidence, critically evaluated. Using only some of the sources, or evaluating them separately without drawing them together, is a failure of the core task.
To see the technique in action, consider a set of four representative contemporary source-types on the mid-Tudor crises, chosen to illustrate the range of evidence the enquiry draws on. These are not transcriptions of particular documents, and no words are placed in the mouths of real sources; each is described as the kind of source you might meet, and framed to show what such a source would offer and how it should be evaluated. Suppose the interpretation to be tested is: "The mid-Tudor years of 1547–1558 were a period of crisis in which government came close to breaking down." Here are four source-types with which to test it.
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