British history questions :D

The civil wars of the seventeenth century were indeed a power struggle between King and Parliament. Whether or not the idea of divine right was really involved ignores the personality of the first King Charles. He was stubborn, pig-headed, overbearing and, essentially, a bully who would not be contradicted. I suspect that he'd have been just as intractable without reference to the concept of divine right.

2. = C (but it's more complicated than that)

3. = B, although that's misleading. The English did not invent the printing press. The Chinese were using a press with wooden blocks in the 7th century, and were using something like moveable type by the 11th century. Hand presses for wood blocks were already common in Europe by the end of the 13th century, and even some moveable type. But the type had to be carved by hand in soft metal, and wasn't more profitable than hand-copied manuscripts. Gutenberg revolutionized the process by creating molds to turn out the moveable type in large quantities in a harder, more durable form, and relatively cheaply, too. Gutenberg had been a goldsmith, and was familiar with mold techniques, even for very small, very detailed work. Apparently, it had never occured to anyone to pour iron into small molds.

Antwerp became a center for printing, and they did large, contracts runs of books in any language. Thomas Caxton learned the business in Antwerp, while printing books for sale in England, in English. Soon he went to London and set up a printing press to bypass the shipping costs and cut out the middle man. That was, i believe, in the mid-1470s.

4. = crusade

5. = you are correct. Members of the House of Lords were life peers who held their seats hereditarily--they were not elected.

6. = I can't speak for contemporary London, but for most of the city's history, east of Houndsditch (i.e., outside the old, eastern city wall) the city was an area of manufacturing, warehousing (because it was near the docks) and cheap tenement housing for the poor. Before you answer that, you'll need to wait for an Englishman to show up to tell you what it's like today.

I believe the east end has transformed itself into the Canary Wharf and it's where a ton of the cultural olympic stuff will be happening. I don't live there, so this would be hearsay..

Life peers do not inherit their titles, they are awarded them, and the title dies with them. Margaret Thatcher for instance is a baroness, but when she dies, her son Mark remains plain old Mister.

Hereditary peers inherit their titles and pass them on when they die.

It all depends on which part of the East End you're talking about. The area has seen rapid gentrification around Canary Wharf, Docklands Airport, and social cleansing by the Tories around the Olympic site

There's still a lot of the old East End about elsewhere.

1
) correct, 2) A 3) Printing Press, Renaissance and humanism were all late 15C, difficult question to answer 4) Crusades, 5) False, because you need a non-elected, ie non-political, body to counterbalance a politically elected lower house. 6)False, the East end is a low income, multi-ethnic group, based in the poorest sections of the capital

PS Mark thatcher will not be plain Mr , he has inherited his father's title, that of Baronet and is now Sir Mark Thatcher, bt -

He's still an arsehole though.