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The BattleUKADMPYour browser does not support the element. of Hastings is not a bother. Almost all Britons would know, as the British citizenship test demands they should, both when it was fought (1066) and who won (William the Conqueror). Many might also manage Agincourt (1415, Henry V); a few could probably even get Bosworth Field (1485, Henry VII). But then the test, and the battles, get harder (Battle of the Boyne, anyone?). Other topics are even more of a struggle. How many Britons could confidently plot Bradford on a map? Or know what an “Ulster fry” is (a food? a crime?). Or be able to say who Kenneth MacAlpin was (a building magnate?).What makes someone British? According to the law, the answer is simple: someone with British citizenship. But according to the “Life in the ” test—a 24-question, 45-minute multiple-choice test taken on computer in a test centre—a Briton is a far more quixotic creature.To judge by the test’s preparatory handbook, they combine a fine knowledge of British history with an enthusiasm for Sunday roasts, Welsh cakes and celebrating Diwali in Leicester. They like gambling and going to pub quizzes (where they can tell you that Kenneth MacAlpin was a ninth-century Scottish king). Britons enjoy the Boat Race and pepper their speech with phrases such as “[he] bowled a googly!”. On they like nothing more than to “play jokes on [people] until midday”. They sound, in short, insufferable.The test does capture one quintessentially English quality—irony. This is because most native-born Britons would probably flunk it. David Cameron, the prime minister who oversaw the addition of a history section to the test in 2013, failed his own questions on live television when he could date but not translate the Magna Carta (it means “Big Charter”). Others struggle, too. The test, which has been sat over 2m times since it was introduced in 2005, costs £50 ($65) a pop to take and requires a score of at least 75% to pass, has a failure rate of around a quarter. It is, says Thom Brooks, a professor of law and government at Durham University, like a “bad pub quiz” filled with “insane trivia” that “makes no sense [as] a test for British citizenship”. The last government promised a panel to review it, but this has not yet materialised.Citizenship is an ancient ideal. So, too, is the granting of it to non-citizens in ways that are odd, even whimsical. In 212 an emperor called Caracalla extended Roman citizenship to all free people in the Roman empire, who had to pay him taxes and bear his name. His example later inspired the British empire to allow citizens from all over its own territories to settle in Britain. The right was enshrined in the 1948 “British Nationality Act”, which, as one put it, allowed a man to say “Civis Britannicus sum” and live where he liked. Where women and non-Latin-speakers might live was left unspecified.The test is also part of a less generous tradition. The first country to introduce a citizenship test was America in 1887: it took the form of a aimed at keeping out illiterate eastern and southern Europeans. Since the 1990s Canada, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands, as well as Britain itself, have all followed suit. Most bill them as “integration” tests. Nonsense, say critics: they are barriers to integration, not bridges to it.Whatever they are for, they are telling for what they choose to include and omit. Most countries follow a similar formula, seasoning starchier questions on government and law with ones on history (the German test emphasises the Holocaust, the American one slavery) and culture (the Dutch test notes that they like to put their rubbish in the right bins). The British test is not given to self-reflection. Beneath the title “A Long and Illustrious History”, it describes Elizabethan colonisation as “a time of growing patriotism” when proud explorers “sought new trade routes” in the Americas. Later, it notes that many thought empire was “a force for good in the world”. Which leaves a little unsaid.The test is flawed, then. But, argues Dan Jones, a historian, not to have any of the past would pander to a “prissy metropolitan distaste” of anything that smacks of patriotism. Besides, he adds, anyone who studied it would do well in a “local pub quiz”. And there are few things more British than that.
