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Half of the Y107 examination is a single, distinctive skill: the Section A source enquiry, in which you are given four contemporary written sources on an aspect of the mid-Tudor period and asked to judge how far, taken together, they support a stated interpretation. This is the heart of the unit's AO2 — the ability to analyse and evaluate primary source material as evidence, weighing each source by its provenance, tone, purpose, and context. The set enquiry topic for this unit is the Mid-Tudor Crises of 1547–1558: the turbulent reigns of Edward VI and Mary I, examined in depth in Lessons 1 and 2, which supply the historical knowledge you will bring to bear on the sources. This lesson does two things at once. First, it consolidates the content of the mid-Tudor years — and, crucially, the great historiographical debate about whether those years constituted a genuine "crisis" at all — so that you can contextualise the sources an examiner might set. Second, it teaches the skill of the four-source enquiry itself: how the task works, what a strong answer does, and the specific analytical moves that separate a top-band source evaluation from a weak one.
The enquiry skill is not, at bottom, about deciding whether a source is "reliable" or "unreliable" — a binary that examiners actively penalise. It is about understanding what each source is: who produced it, for whom, to what end, and in what circumstances — and therefore what it can and cannot tell us. A partisan source is not useless; it is excellent evidence of the partisanship of its author. A source that states something untrue is not thereby worthless; its very error may illuminate the beliefs or purposes of the person who wrote it. The mid-Tudor crises are ideal territory for learning this discipline precisely because the surviving evidence — rebel manifestos, privy-council minutes, ambassadors' dispatches, martyrologies and chronicles — is so obviously shaped by the interests and viewpoints of those who produced it. Learning to read that shaping is the AO2 skill.
The organising question is this: how far do a set of four contemporary sources support the view that England experienced a genuine "crisis" in the years 1547–1558 — and, more fundamentally, how does a strong answer weigh contemporary sources as evidence, by provenance, tone, purpose, and context, rather than by the false test of "reliability"?
By the end of this lesson you will be able to:
This lesson belongs to OCR H505 Unit Y107 (British period study & enquiry): England 1547–1603 — The Later Tudors, and it is the heart of the AO2 skill for the whole unit. It is examined in one specific way:
Because the enquiry is anchored on the mid-Tudor crises, this lesson necessarily revisits the content of Lessons 1 and 2 — the reigns of Edward VI and Mary I — but its purpose is different: to equip you to contextualise and evaluate sources on those years, not to argue a period-study essay about them. Our approach leads with the source-skill itself and treats the historical content as the contextual knowledge the skill draws upon — a pedagogical arrangement of our own, not a transcription of the specification's ordering (refer to the official OCR specification for exact wording). The "Working with Sources" sections of every other lesson in this course have been building toward this one; here the skill is the whole subject.
To evaluate sources on the mid-Tudor years you must first command the events they describe — because AO2 evaluation depends on contextual knowledge, the yardstick against which a source's claims are tested. Lessons 1 and 2 cover this ground in full; what follows is a focused recap of the developments most likely to underlie a Section A source.
| Development | Detail relevant to source evaluation |
|---|---|
| Minority rule under Edward VI (1547–53) | A boy-king never ruled; power passed to the Dukes of Somerset (Lord Protector, 1547–49) and then Northumberland (Lord President, 1549–53) — so official documents of the reign speak with the voice of a regency, not a reigning monarch |
| The Edwardian Reformation | The drive from Henrician conservatism to a fully Reformed Church (the 1549 and 1552 Prayer Books, the Forty-Two Articles) — the religious change that provoked the Western Rising and divided the realm |
| The rebellions of 1549 | The religious Western (Prayer Book) Rising and the economic Kett's Rebellion — both generating rebel manifestos that are prime enquiry sources |
| The succession crisis of 1553 | The failed attempt to divert the crown to Lady Jane Grey, which collapsed when the realm rallied to Mary as legitimate heir |
| Mary I and the Catholic restoration (1553–58) | The reversal of the Reformation, the reconciliation with Rome under Pole, and the ~284 burnings memorialised — and mythologised — in Foxe's martyrology |
| The loss of Calais (1558) | The last English foothold in France, lost in Mary's Spanish-tied war — the conventional nadir of Tudor foreign policy |
This context is the raw material of the enquiry in two senses. First, the events themselves — rebellions, religious change, a usurpation, persecutions — generated the documents (manifestos, minutes, dispatches, martyrologies) an examiner will set. Second, your knowledge of these events is what allows you to test those documents: to recognise when a rebel manifesto is framing its demands for effect, when an ambassador is telling his master what he wishes to hear, or when a martyrology is shaping memory rather than recording fact. Without the context, source evaluation collapses into guesswork; with it, evaluation becomes disciplined argument.
The interpretation a Section A enquiry asks you to test will very often turn on the word "crisis" — because whether these years constituted a genuine crisis is the great historiographical debate of the period, and understanding it is essential both to contextualising sources and to judging the interpretations built upon them.
The older view, powerfully associated with G.R. Elton and given its classic statement in W.R.D. Jones's The Mid-Tudor Crisis (1973), saw something close to systemic breakdown: minority and female rule, a debased coinage and galloping inflation, the twin rebellions of 1549, the religious see-saw, a naked coup over the succession in 1553, the burnings, and the humiliation of Calais combined into a multi-dimensional strain on the very structure of the state. On this reading, the mid-Tudor years were the sagging, dangerous trough of the century — a polity lurching from one emergency to the next.
Against this, a powerful revisionist current — above all Jennifer Loach and David Loades, with Dale Hoak on the workings of the Privy Council — has argued that the "crisis" has been badly overstated. Their case is that the institutions of government went on functioning: Parliament sat and legislated, the Council governed, administration continued, and both Northumberland and (on the revisionist reading) the Marian regime pursued genuine and competent reform — the recoinage, the reform of the revenue courts, naval and customs reform. Above all, a state that managed the peaceful succession of three monarchs in eleven years — including the defeat of an attempted usurpation in 1553 precisely because the realm rallied to the legitimate heir — is a strange candidate for "collapse." The difficulties were real, the revisionists concede, but they amounted to strain, not systemic breakdown.
| Interpretation | Argument (paraphrased) | Evaluation |
|---|---|---|
| The "crisis" thesis (G.R. Elton; W.R.D. Jones) | A genuine, multi-dimensional crisis: minority/female rule, fiscal exhaustion, debasement, inflation, rebellion, religious turmoil, and foreign humiliation amounted to a systemic strain on the state | Valuable for cataloguing the genuine problems, but tends to aggregate difficulties into a "crisis" contemporaries may not have experienced as a single collapse |
| The revisionist reading (Jennifer Loach; David Loades) | Government continued to function: Parliament and Council worked, both regimes pursued competent reform, and the orderly succession of three monarchs is the opposite of breakdown — stability, not crisis | The now-dominant view; restores agency and competence to the mid-Tudor regimes, though some argue it underrates the depth of the religious upheaval |
| Dale Hoak | Detailed study of the Edwardian Privy Council shows it working as an effective instrument of government even amid factional change | Grounds the revisionist case in the machinery of administration |
| The disaggregating synthesis | "Crisis" overstates the political condition (government held) but captures the religious upheaval (the violent confessional see-saw) — strain weathered by a resilient state | The most defensible position; separates the dimensions rather than delivering a blanket verdict |
For the enquiry, this debate matters because a Section A interpretation will typically assert either that the sources show a realm in crisis or that they show a functioning state under strain — and your task is to judge how far the four given sources support that view. Knowing the debate lets you see what the interpretation is claiming and what would count as evidence for or against it. The disaggregating synthesis — political resilience alongside genuine religious turmoil — is usually the most defensible judgement, but the enquiry asks you to reach it through the sources, not to impose it upon them.
The Section A task is precise, and understanding exactly what it asks is the first step to doing it well. You are given four contemporary written sources and a stated interpretation, and you must judge how far the sources, taken together, support that interpretation. The assessment objective is AO2 throughout: the analysis and evaluation of source material as evidence.
The single most important thing to grasp is what evaluation is — and is not. It is not a verdict on whether a source is "reliable" or "unreliable." That binary is the commonest and most heavily penalised error in the whole paper, because it misunderstands what a source is. Every contemporary source is partial; every one was produced by someone with a viewpoint and a purpose. The question is never "can we trust it?" but "what is this source evidence of, and how far does it support the given interpretation?" A hostile, one-sided source can be superb evidence — of the hostility and one-sidedness of its author, and often of much else besides.
Evaluation proceeds through four lenses, which you should apply to every source:
| Lens | What it asks | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Provenance | Who produced this, when, and in what form (a minute, a petition, a dispatch, a chronicle)? | The origin shapes what the source can know and how it is angled; a rebel manifesto and a council minute "know" different things |
| Tone | How is it written — dutiful, angry, anxious, triumphant, reverent? | Tone is a clue to purpose and audience; a "loyal petition" tone may be a deliberate tactic, not a transparent feeling |
| Purpose | Why was it produced, and for whom? What was it trying to achieve? | Purpose governs selection and emphasis; a document meant to legitimise, persuade, or edify will shape its content accordingly |
| Context | What do you know about the events that lets you test the source's claims? | Your contextual knowledge is the yardstick: it lets you judge whether a claim is plausible, exaggerated, selective, or self-serving |
A strong answer does four things with these lenses. It evaluates each of the four sources by provenance, tone, purpose, and context — not merely summarising what each says, but weighing what each is evidence of. It uses contextual knowledge to test and qualify each source's claims. It cross-uses the sources — setting them against one another, using each to corroborate, challenge, or qualify the others, rather than treating them in isolation. And it reaches a substantiated judgement on how far, taken together, the four sources support the given interpretation. Crucially, a top answer uses all four sources: ignoring one, or treating three as background to a favourite, is a serious and avoidable failing.
To see the skill in action, consider a Section A enquiry built around the interpretation that "the years 1547–1558 were a period of genuine crisis for the English state." An examiner would set four contemporary written sources; the four representative source-types below are the kinds of document such an enquiry typically draws upon. Each is described as a type — "a source of this type would…" — and written for teaching. No verbatim words are attributed to any real document; the point is to model how each kind of source is evaluated and cross-used, not to reproduce or invent primary text.
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