Key terms & definitions

A long-standing conflict between families or groups, sustained through hostility and retaliation.

Charges arising from a lord’s rights over his tenants, including payments connected with inheritance and wardship.

A system in which land was held from a superior lord in return for obligations such as loyalty, military service or labour.

A stratification system associated with medieval Europe, organised around landownership, with the monarch above lords and knights, and serfs and peasants at the bottom.

A system in which land was held from a lord in return for obligations such as service and payments.

Soldiers raised through obligations owed by landholders to their lords.

A ruler or lord to whom other lords owed loyalty and obligations. Overlordship did not necessarily mean direct government of every territory.

Military service owed to a lord or monarch as part of the obligations attached to holding land.

A hierarchy of landholding in which people held land from a superior lord in return for obligations, including loyalty, payments and military service.

The German word for ‘leader’; the title Hitler adopted when he combined the offices of president and chancellor in August 1934.

The idealised image promoted by Nazi propaganda of Hitler as a heroic, wise and unfailing leader who represented Germany.

The ‘leader principle’: the belief that a single leader should have unquestioned authority.

Mary's willing assent to God's plan at the Annunciation; the Latin word means 'let it be done'.

The sequence $1,1,2,3,5,8,\ldots$, in which each new term is the sum of the previous two.

A sequence in which, in the usual form, each term after the first two is the sum of the preceding two terms.

Material in plant foods that is not digested and helps food and waste move through the digestive system.

A fine, hair-like strand used to make textile materials.

A combination of different fibre types within a yarn, produced by bringing the fibres together during spinning.

A fabric constructed using yarns of different types, rather than necessarily combining the fibres within each yarn.

A network cable that carries data as pulses of light.

A composite containing reinforcing fibres within a polymer resin. The fibres carry loads and provide stiffness, while the resin transfers loads between fibres and protects them.

A layer of loose fibres arranged into a sheet before they are consolidated or bonded into fabric.

An insoluble protein that forms a mesh during blood clotting.

An insoluble protein that forms a mesh of fibres, trapping blood cells to help form a clot.

A soluble protein in blood plasma that is converted into fibrin during clotting.

The thinner bone on the outer side of the lower leg, alongside the tibia.

Writing about imagined characters and events, such as a novel or short story.

An invented narrative whose characters and events need not represent real people or actual occurrences.

Writing that uses invented characters or events to tell a story; it can communicate religious or moral ideas without claiming that the events actually happened.

An explanation for visual illusions in which real visual elements cause a person to perceive a feature that is not physically present in the stimulus.