IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 265

For nearly twenty years before 1588 England and Spain had drifted towards open war. The wealth of Spain's American empire crossed the Atlantic in convoys, and English privateers licensed by Elizabeth intercepted it; Drake's raid on Cadiz in 1587 destroyed shipping and stores gathered for Philip II's fleet. In the Netherlands, where the Protestant provinces had been in revolt since the 1560s, Elizabeth had sent money and, in 1585, an army. The execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, in February 1587 removed the last serious Catholic claimant to the English throne.

Philip's strategy was not a simple invasion. A fleet was to sail up the Channel, join the Duke of Parma's veteran army in the Spanish Netherlands and escort it across to England in barges. Success depended on the two forces meeting at the right moment, for the fleet could not wait at sea and Parma's men could not be kept embarked in flat-bottomed boats indefinitely. Parma's ports, Dunkirk and Nieuwpoort, were shallow and easily blocked, and a squadron of Dutch rebel vessels lay off them.

The fleet that assembled was large but mixed: about 130 ships, only a minority purpose-built warships, the rest converted merchantmen, galleasses and small dispatch vessels, carrying sailors, soldiers, priests and volunteers. Its first commander, the Marquis of Santa Cruz, died in February 1588. Philip then turned to the Duke of Medina Sidonia, an able administrator with no experience of the sea, who protested his inadequacy and was overruled. The fleet left Lisbon at the end of May and was battered by storms. It put into A Coruña for repairs, and did not enter the Channel until the end of July.

The English fleet was smaller but better suited to the fighting that followed. Howard of Effingham commanded, with Drake, Hawkins and Frobisher among his squadron leaders. English hulls were longer in proportion to their width than the Spanish, could sail closer into the wind, and carried heavy guns on lower decks, where they could be loaded and fired quickly. Spanish gunnery was intended for a short exchange at close range followed by grappling and boarding; if the English kept their distance, the advantage passed to them.

The Armada sailed in a defensive formation the English called the crescent: a curved line, thicker at the two horns, with the transports and weaker ships in the middle. It was a convoy formation rather than a fighting one, and hard to hold as wind and tide pushed the fleet up the Channel. The English hung on the rear, where it was weakest, and fought running actions past Plymouth, Portland and the Isle of Wight, keeping out of reach of boarding.

At the beginning of August the Armada reached Calais and anchored, waiting for news of Parma. The English had a simple remedy. On the night of 7–8 August they filled eight old vessels with pitch, tar, brimstone and gunpowder, set them alight and sent them with wind and tide into the crowded anchorage. The fireships did little damage, for the Spanish saw them coming and had time to cut their cables, but they scattered, lost their anchors, and in the dark several ships collided.

Next morning the English attacked the scattered fleet off Gravelines. The fighting lasted much of the day. The Spanish fought hard, but their ammunition was running low and their ships were too slow to close. Several were driven ashore or sunk. Then the wind shifted, and the Armada was carried north into the North Sea, unable to turn back towards Flanders. Parma's army, still blockaded by the Dutch, never came out, and the junction on which everything depended had failed.

There was now no course but home, and the only route lay round the north of Scotland and down the west of Ireland. It was a passage through waters the Spanish did not know, in damaged ships short of food and water, in the gales of an Atlantic autumn. Some two dozen ships were lost on the coasts of Scotland and Ireland, and survivors who reached land were often killed by local lords or handed to English troops. Of the great fleet that had left Lisbon, only about half the ships came back to Spain.

The human losses were severe. Thousands of men died, most of them not in battle: they died of typhus and dysentery, of hunger and thirst, or by drowning when a ship broke up on a rock.

Historians once told the story as a tale of English seamanship against Spanish mismanagement. Work in the Spanish archives has altered that. The papers of Philip's administration, kept at Simancas, show how carefully the expedition was planned and how much of the failure lay in the arrangement with Parma, which no preparation could have made work. Excavation of the Trinidad Valencera, lost off Donegal, the Santa Maria de la Rosa in Blasket Sound and the Girona on the north coast has produced guns, shot and everyday equipment, and has shown how many ships were lost not in the fighting but afterwards, in the weather.

What emerges is not incompetence but a plan that demanded more than the technology of the age could deliver: two armies and a fleet, a fixed timetable, and a Channel that could not be controlled. Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker, whose history of the Armada drew on both the Spanish archives and the underwater evidence, describe a campaign that came closer to success than the older accounts allowed.

Between the accession of George I in 1714 and the death of George IV in 1830, the terrace became the characteristic form of urban housing in Britain. A terrace is a row of houses joined side by side, sharing walls, roof and, above all, a single facade. Rows of this kind were built in London, Bath, Dublin, Edinburgh and the new industrial towns, and a remarkable number of them are still lived in today. Their uniform fronts, symmetrical windows and long brick walls are still instantly recognisable from the street. In Bath, the Royal Crescent and the Circus show how a curved or circular row could be made to look like a single palace.

Most terraces were speculative. A landowner granted a builder a lease, commonly for ninety-nine years, on condition that he put up houses of an agreed quality within a fixed time; the landowner then collected ground rents from the finished properties. Builders were often small men, a bricklayer or a carpenter with a little capital, who built two or three houses at a time and moved on. The architecture was therefore standardised not because a single designer planned it but because the lease imposed a pattern. A uniform row was also easier to sell than a row of competing experiments. Behind the identical fronts, individual houses varied considerably in size, plan and decoration.

Fire was the reason for the earliest and most influential rules. After the Great Fire of London in 1666, parliament insisted that new houses be made of brick or stone, not timber, and the London Building Act of 1774 went further, sorting houses into four classes according to their size and value. The Act laid down the thickness of walls for each class, required windows to be set back from the face of the wall so that fire could not so easily spread from one house to the next, and demanded parapets that would stop flames running along a roof. Party walls between neighbours had to rise above the roof line.

Materials varied with locality and with the tax system. London was built mainly of stock brick, a yellowish brick made from local clay, with red brick used for arches over windows and doorways; grander terraces were fronted with Portland stone or stucco. Bath had its own pale limestone, and Edinburgh its sandstone. Roofs were covered with slate brought by sea from Wales and Cornwall, and were usually hidden behind a parapet so that the terrace presented a single wall to the street. From 1784 a tax on bricks encouraged builders to use fewer and larger bricks, a change that can still be detected in the dimensions of surviving walls.

Windows are the most useful guide to the period. The sash window, in which one frame slides past another on cords and weights, replaced the earlier casement during the eighteenth century, and the familiar pattern of six small panes above six below became standard. Glazing bars, the thin wooden strips that divide the panes, grew progressively narrower as glass-making improved, which is another clue to date. The window tax, introduced in 1696 and repeatedly increased, charged householders according to the number of windows in a property. It explains a curious feature of many old terraces: openings that were bricked up by owners anxious to reduce their bill. The tax was finally abolished in 1851.

The front of a terrace says little about how the house was used. In a typical London house of the better sort, the ground floor held a dining room and a study, the first floor a pair of drawing rooms with the tallest windows in the building, and the bedrooms were above. Servants worked in a basement kitchen, reached by a narrow staircase and lit by windows opening onto a sunken area behind iron railings. Families of quite different means might occupy different floors of the same house, and by the later nineteenth century many terraces had been divided into lodgings.

Historians have several ways of finding out about such houses. Title deeds and building leases show who owned the land, how far it extended, and when it was built on. Rate books, compiled annually for local taxation, list the occupiers of each property. Fire insurance records, often marked by a small metal plaque fixed to the wall, describe the materials and uses of a building at the time it was insured. From 1841 the census returns give the names, ages and occupations of everyone sleeping in a house on a particular night, while trade directories reveal which premises were shops. Ordnance Survey maps show how a street and its gardens changed over time. Standing buildings can also be read as documents, through the size of bricks and the tool marks on timbers. Conservators can date successive layers of paint and wallpaper in a room, which shows how decoration changed.

None of this evidence is complete. Records were kept by owners, insurers and tax collectors rather than by the people who lived in the cellars, and they say almost nothing about the servants who made up a large share of the population of any Georgian town. The census itself captured everyone in a house on a single night once in ten years. Style is an unreliable guide to date, since a builder might go on using a fashionable detail for thirty years after it first appeared, and roof timbers are often reused from older buildings, which makes them useless for dating. The history of an ordinary house, in short, is a jigsaw assembled from fragments, and there is always a piece missing.

The scene is a familiar one in staffrooms. A history teacher describes the lesson that worked best: pupils bent over a photocopy of a census page, an extract from a diary, a photograph of a street, a letter written in a shaking hand. The pupil, not the teacher, is doing the work. From such scenes comes the argument that school history should be built on original sources and that textbooks, which digest the past into a tidy narrative, should be kept in a subordinate role. The case is a strong one, but it is not complete.

The advocates of source work begin from a claim about what history actually is. History is not the past; it is an argument about the past constructed from the traces that survive. A textbook conceals this. It delivers conclusions, such as that a reform was popular or that a battle was decisive, without showing the reader what those conclusions rest on. A document, even a dull one, restores the uncertainty. Pupils who compare two newspaper reports of the same event, or two accounts of the same strike, discover that evidence can disagree, and that the historian's job is to weigh it. A pupil who has handled three or four such documents has begun to understand how historical knowledge is made, rather than merely receiving it.

There is also the matter of engagement. A facsimile letter is an object from another world, and its very oddness, in the handwriting, the spelling and the unfamiliar turn of phrase, is a way into that world. Teachers often report that reluctant pupils, who switch off when asked to read a textbook page, will work hard on a document that puzzles them. The skills involved, moreover, are not confined to history: judging the reliability of a claim, and asking who produced it and why, is useful in any walk of life.

Yet the objections are serious. A document is a fragment, and often an unrepresentative one. A single letter home from a soldier tells us what that soldier chose to write; it does not tell us how the war was experienced by a million others, and a pupil who is given nothing else will draw a confident conclusion from almost nothing. Historians spend years acquiring the context that makes a source intelligible. Handed a document about a dispute over a will, pupils who do not know how property, marriage or the law worked in that period will read it through the assumptions of their own day.

The difficulty of the material should not be underestimated either. Documents are written in the language of their time, in handwriting that may take an hour to decipher, and in the case of foreign archives in another language altogether. Translations introduce a further layer of interpretation, since the choices made by a translator are invisible to the reader. A teacher who gives up three lessons to a document has spent time that could have covered a century. Digitisation has made an enormous difference, since a pupil can now search a whole archive from a laptop, but a search returns only what has been catalogued, and the catalogue itself is a selection.

Critics of the source-based approach add a further charge: it can turn into a game of guessing. Asked what a photograph tells them, pupils guess; asked whether a source is biased, they answer that it always is, and stop. The exercise appears to teach scepticism but produces only a shallow cynicism, in which every account is equally suspect and none is better than another. What is missing is knowledge: the ability to say that this account is more reliable because it was written by someone who was there, and to know who was likely to be there.

Textbooks, meanwhile, are blamed for faults that belong to bad textbooks rather than to the form itself. A good one does what no collection of documents can do: it supplies the shape of a period, the sequence of events, the scale of a change, and it moves a pupil from 1500 to 1800 without losing the thread. It can gather in one place the conclusions of research that no pupil could read at first hand. It gives a class something to argue with, which is more than can be said for a single photograph. A poor one tells a single smooth story, avoids genuine controversy, and leaves no room for doubt.

The sensible arrangement, it seems to me, is not a choice but a sequence. Pupils need a framework of knowledge first, taught largely from a good narrative account, because without it a document cannot be read. On that framework a small number of sources can then be set, chosen with care and studied slowly: two accounts of the same event, a building in the pupils' own street, a page of a local newspaper, the census page for the house they live in. Fewer sources, examined properly, teach more than a folder of extracts skimmed in a lesson.

What follows from this is that the argument between sources and textbooks is a false one. Sources without knowledge become decoration, and knowledge without sources becomes dogma. The aim should be a pupil who knows the outline of the story and also knows how the story was put together. Such a pupil will read a textbook with a critical eye, which is, after all, the point.