From Henry VIII to Winston Churchill, and the Battle of Hastings to the Gunpowder Plot, British history is filled with instantly recognisable characters and stories. But recognisable and true are not always the same thing, and as decades become centuries fact and folklore can easily combine. From Britain's distant Viking past right up to the D-Day landings, here are some of the biggest myths that many Brits believe.

Click through this gallery to uncover the most common misconceptions about the history of the UK...

The phrase 'lions led by donkeys' has come to exemplify British attitudes towards World War I. Time and again thousands of brave British soldiers were sent 'over the top' to be mown down by German guns, in an often vain attempt to reclaim a few square miles of Belgian mud.

The cycle of slaughter did not reflect well on the army’s aristocratic commanders, on whose orders the flower of British youth lived and died. This trope is personified by the buffoonish General Melchett (left) in British comedy series Blackadder, who strategises that "doing precisely what we've done 18 times before is exactly the last thing they'll expect us to do this time".

Though understandably appealing, this portrait of British higher-ups as incompetent toffs quaffing sherry in plush HQs miles away from the action isn’t fair. They were hardly blameless, but generals had to adapt quickly to a new era of industrial warfare in which defence was much stronger than offence, and, in the words of French commander General Mangin, "whatever you do, you lose a lot of men".

The officer class was also expected to lead from the front and suffered a higher casualty rate than the ordinary soldier. Prime minister Herbert Asquith lost a son, while future PMs Andrew Bonar Law and Anthony Eden lost two sons and two brothers respectively.

It would be a big ask for any war to last exactly 100 years, but the Hundred Years’ War – at 116 years, four months, three weeks and four days – wasn’t particularly close. The conflict began in 1337 when the English king Edward III invaded Flanders to assert his claim to the French throne.

The following century-and-a-bit saw no fewer than five English monarchs attempt to back up Edward’s assertions on the battlefield and at the negotiating table. After crushing defeats at Crécy and Poitiers, and later at Agincourt, the French eventually turned the tide under the saintly stewardship of Joan of Arc.

The fall of Bordeaux to the French in 1453 is usually considered the war's end, as it was England’s last continental possession besides the long-held port of Calais. But the name 'the 116 Years War' wouldn’t be quite accurate either, as the fighting was more a succession of wars interrupted by long periods of peace.

Most medieval conflicts were more conscientious in their timekeeping, and the Seven Years War (1756-1763), Nine Years War (1688-1697), Thirty Years War (1618-1648) and Eighty Years War (1568-1648) all hit their timings bang on.

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Supposedly said by an unsmiling Queen Victoria in response to a risqué joke, "we are not amused" is one of British history’s best-known quotes. The line helps paint Victoria as Britain’s grumpiest monarch, and has come to epitomise the stiff humourlessness of the Victorian era.

However, if we believe the queen’s nearest and dearest, the quote is as false as the impression it creates. In a 1976 interview, Victoria’s granddaughter Princess Alice claimed that she never uttered the immortal phrase, while Victoria’s diaries reveal an exuberant woman who was regularly amused. According to Vicky of Prussia, the queen "often laughed til she was red in the face, and even til she cried".

Why, then, is Victoria seen as such a sourpuss? In pictures she's stony-faced, but that’s more a quirk of 19th-century photography than of her character. Long exposure times forced subjects to hold a single expression, and the general policy was to adopt a passive stare.

Her reputation is also tarnished by her later years, when she dressed in black and shunned public duties after the death of her beloved husband Albert, earning the nickname 'the widow of Windsor'. It's impossible to prove beyond doubt that Victoria never said the words "we are not amused" across her 63-year reign, but we can certainly say that in her personal life she was pretty un-Victorian.

One person has shaped public opinion on medieval monarchs more than any other: William Shakespeare. Writing in the late-16th and early-17th centuries, Shakespeare wrote 10 plays named after and starring English kings, in which he paints them as pious and heroic warriors (Henry V), narcissists blinded by flattery (Richard II) and ageing philosophers tormented by guilt and doubt (Henry IV).

It’s no coincidence that many of Shakespeare’s depictions tally with the politics of the ruling Tudor and Stuart dynasties, whose patronage he enjoyed. Nowhere is this truer than in Richard III, which profiles the king the Tudor dynasty deposed.

"Since I cannot prove a lover," states Richard in his opening monologue, "I am determined to prove a villain". He proceeds to merrily murder and manipulate his way to power over two-and-a-half cartoonishly evil hours, killing his nephews (the famous 'princes in the Tower'), his wife Lady Anne, several noblemen and his brother Clarence en route.

As with most of Shakespeare's portrayals, it's not entirely unfair, and most historians agree that the princes in the Tower died on his orders. But he played no part in Clarence's death, Lady Anne probably died of tuberculosis and the tone of the play is pure political propaganda.

There's no question that Guy Fawkes is the public face of the Gunpowder Plot. In the early hours of 5 November 1605, he was found lurking in the basement of the Houses of Parliament with a fuse, a box of matches and 36 barely-disguised barrels of gunpowder. Effigies of the would-be king-killer are still burned every year on Bonfire Night, while children traditionally patrol towns and villages requesting a 'penny for the guy'.

Guy Fawkes masks have also become go-to anti-establishment symbols, particularly among anarchists. They were popularised by the graphic novel and film V for Vendetta, and are used by noted hacking group Anonymous.

Fawkes is the only gunpowder plotter most people have heard of, but he was merely the group's triggerman. Landowner Robert Catesby was the mastermind, supported by Thomas Winter – who recruited Fawkes. And unfortunately for anarchists everywhere, the Catholic conspirators were motivated by a desire to eliminate the Protestant regime of James I, rather than by high ideals of liberty. They had no intention of abolishing the throne – they just wanted a Catholic sitting on it.

These are the earliest photographs of the UK

Every British schoolchild can tell you that in 1066 William the Conqueror became King of England by defeating Harold the Saxon at the Battle of Hastings. William came from Normandy, a region of France that he held as a vassal of the French king. Harold the Saxon, meanwhile, was born in England, and in some contexts historians use 'Anglo-Saxon' synonymously with 'English'.

It is easy to see how Hastings has slotted into the long history of English-French animosity, particularly given the 250+ years England and France have spent at war since.

The battle, however, was the closing chapter of a multi-candidate succession crisis, not a war between nations.

A Norman duke with Viking heritage, William (pictured) was culturally, ethnically and linguistically separate from the French aristocracy, and crossed the English Channel for himself – not for France. Harold was the son of noted nobleman Earl Godwin, who had risen to prominence during the reign of the Viking king of England, Canute the Great. The only contender directly descended from England’s royal line – the teenage Edgar the Atheling – had been frozen out long before battle was joined.

The year 1066 is a foundational date in British history. The Norman Conquest kicks off the traditional chronology of English monarchs, and a diligent history student could reel off a list that leads from William I all the way up to Charles III today.

This has helped create a patriotic myth that 'Fortress Britain' has not been sullied by foreign boots for almost a millennium – that the British have done all the invading, and none of the being invaded. It's true that 1066 was a hostile takeover of unusual scale and success, but it was not by any means the last.

Indeed, a Danish army invaded northern England just three years after William I’s coronation. The French then took up the task, and their 1216 invasion saw Louis VIII of France briefly proclaimed king. Henry II, Henry IV, Edward IV, Henry VII and William III (pictured) all took the throne at the head of invading armies, most of which contained troops that served foreign crowns.

England and Scotland invaded each other repeatedly before unifying in 1707, while the most recent invasion took place in 1797, when 1,400 drunken French soldiers landed in Wales and caroused for three days. It doesn’t rank among the upper echelons of attempted conquests, but it still counts.

Most medieval kings would kill to go down in history as 'the Lionheart', and killing, as it happens, is what Richard I was best at. Richard (ruled 1189-1199) spent most of his reign on crusade or at war with France, and his image as a paragon of Christian virtue started as a PR campaign by his mother to raise funds for his ransom when he was imprisoned in Germany in 1192.

His saintly reputation endures via the tale of Robin Hood, in which 'Good King Richard' returns from crusade to save England from the ravages of his avaricious brother, 'Bad King John'. But Richard was no angel, and his decade on the throne was no golden age.

He tried to depose his own father twice before becoming king. He showed little interest in ruling, spending just a few months of his 10-year reign in England. He failed to produce an heir – an essential part of kingship – and roundly ignored his wife.

On crusade he repeatedly broke his promises to his ally Philip II of France, who departed the Holy Land humiliated. He then massacred 2,700 Muslim prisoners – barbarous even in the 12th century. On the way back from crusade he was captured (pictured), and his ransom virtually bankrupted the nation. 'Good King Richard' was an exceptional warrior, but he was a bad son, a bad husband and a bad king.

In 1215, a gang of disgruntled barons forced Bad King John – the only English king dreadful enough to earn that nickname – to sign a charter that put limits on royal power. Eight centuries later during the COVID-19 pandemic, several British business owners attempted to use this charter – Magna Carta – as a legal justification for defying lockdown restrictions.

A hair salon in Bradford, a Bristol tattoo parlour and a Christian bookshop in Nottinghamshire were among those to open illegally, claiming that Article 61 of the tattered document gave sovereign citizens the right to ignore laws they found unjust.

They joined a long line of optimistic attempts to use Magna Carta as a literal get-out-of-jail-free card. There are several problems here.

First, Magna Carta was never a charter of rights for all people, but a series of legal protections for a group of powerful nobles. Second, the original charter never became law, and Article 61 (among others) was removed in later versions. Third, only four of Magna Carta's clauses are still valid; the rest have been repealed. Magna Carta was not a power-to-the-people piece of social democracy, and, if it had been, it would hold little legal relevance today.

Today World War I is rightly remembered as one of the most traumatic episodes in human history, and it claimed the lives of 885,000 British servicemen. But film and TV depictions of wholesale slaughter can lead to the incorrect assumption that deployment to the front was a death sentence.

During major offensives the British army could lose thousands of men in just a few hours, but these brief spasms of terror were broken up by long stretches of grinding monotony. The fatality rate for British soldiers across the conflict was around 11.5% – lower than in the Crimean War six decades earlier.

Some soldiers experienced unimaginable horrors that shattered their bodies and minds, but others avoided major battles and benefitted from guaranteed pay, daily meat rations and a widespread spirit of comradeship.

For some, it was both: take the swaggering figure of Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart, a one-eyed, one-handed officer who was severely wounded eight times through the war’s duration. His troops remembered him for pulling the pins out of grenades with his teeth, and for Sir Adrian a few life-threatening injuries were a small price to pay for camaraderie. "Frankly," he wrote in his autobiography, "I enjoyed the war."

A well-known history joke reads as follows. Advisor: "The peasants are revolting!" King: "You can say that again." Wordplay aside, medieval peasants weren’t as revolting as most modern depictions make out.

In films and TV shows they’re invariably dressed in rags with dirt smeared across their faces, with straggly hair and yellowy-brown teeth. But even peasants would use basins or ewers (large jugs) to wash their faces each morning and their hands before and after eating. Medieval doctors encouraged regular bathing, and well-to-do peasants might own wooden tubs that could be filled with water heated over a fire.

Women were often tasked with washing laundry in streams or rivers (a late-medieval verse reads: "a woman is a worthy thing, they do the wash and do the wring"), while teeth were rinsed with water and cleaned with scraps of cloth. The Welsh were apparently particularly diligent about dental hygiene: "They are constantly cleaning them with green hazel-shoots," wrote Gerald of Wales, "and rubbing them...until they shine like ivory."

Just like in the modern world, not everyone could be bothered. Queen Isabella of Castile reportedly boasted that she had bathed twice in her life – once on the day she was born and once on the day of her wedding.

Charles Darwin (right) ranks alongside Albert Einstein, Mark Twain and Marie Antoinette as one of history’s most misquoted figures, and ‘survival of the fittest’ is among a number of phrases he didn’t coin. It was instead formulated by the sociologist Herbert Spencer (left), who took issue with Darwin’s preferred term, 'natural selection'.

Darwin did not think much of Spencer’s critiques, writing that "somehow I seldom feel any wiser after reading him, but often feel mystified. His style is detestable in my opinion." Darwin did, however, include the phrase a couple of times in his fifth edition of On the Origin of Species, published in 1869.

Today, the term comes with a lot of baggage. Most modern biologists reject the word 'fittest' thanks to its cultural connotations, and it was widely co-opted in the late-19th and early-20th centuries to express and excuse worldviews in which the weak were naturally preyed on by the strong. This so-called 'social Darwinism', a pseudoscience that Darwin himself explicitly disavowed, was used to justify imperialism, eugenics, predator capitalism and, most famously, the ideology of Nazi Germany.

Described by renowned World War II historian Antony Beevor as "perhaps the most realistic battle sequence ever filmed", the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan is just as shocking today as it was in cinemas in 1998.

The scene depicts the chaos and visceral violence of the 1944 D-Day landings on Omaha Beach in Normandy, when Allied troops waded ashore under intense fire. Several of the events depicted are taken directly from survivor accounts, and it was so traumatic for veterans that the US government put out public notices directing distressed former servicemen to designated counselling services.

The myth here arises not from what the movie shows, but from what it doesn’t. Saving Private Ryan is so famous – and so famously accurate – that it dominates public understanding of what D-Day was like.

But British, American and Canadian forces assaulted four other beaches too, and only the first wave of infantry thrown at Omaha endured horrors like those seen on screen. D-Day was the largest seaborne invasion in history, and Saving Private Ryan does a phenomenal job of portraying one specific part of it. It is not, and does not intend to be, a template for the typical D-Day experience.

Henry VIII is the poster child of English medieval history. If you pick up a book on England's kings and queens his face will probably be on the cover, but he’s not a great ambassador, as he’s known the world over for beheading two of his six wives.

Even in Tudor times serial spouse slaughter was frowned upon, and Henry only grew meaner with age, leading some observers to suggest that syphilis had riddled his body and mind. The ulcers on his leg and his remarkably poor reproductive record are corroborating evidence. Despite six marriages and an insatiable appetite for mistresses, Henry only fathered four healthy children – each by a different woman.

This once-fashionable theory is now widely dismissed. Syphilis was a well-known disease and there is no record of Henry receiving the traditional treatment – a six-week course of mercury. None of his wives, mistresses or children showed signs of exposure, and his ulcers were probably caused by deep vein thrombosis.

As for his increasingly erratic cruelty – sometimes also attributed to the trauma of a 1536 jousting accident – the sad truth is that Henry didn't need any medical help to execute his way through his wives and ministers. Ruthlessness had characterised the king all along.

Canute the Great is an unusual figure, as he's almost exclusively remembered for something that isn’t true. The story goes that the king, in a fit of arrogant delusion, attempted to show his power over man and nature by having his chair carried down to the seashore, where he vainly commanded the waves not to break on his feet.

But in our earliest source for the story, the 12th-century Historia Anglorum, Canute follows up his failure with the words "let all the world know that the power of kings is empty...and there is no king worthy of the name save Him by whose will heaven and earth and sea obey eternal laws". The anecdote was meant to demonstrate Canute's piety – not his hubris.

Even this revised story may be folklore, but it at least draws attention to one of England's most overlooked kings. A Danish prince who defeated the Anglo-Saxon ruler Edmund Ironside (supposedly murdered by an assassin while using the facilities), Canute reigned England between 1016 and 1035 and united it with Norway and Denmark to form the short-lived North Sea Empire.

His dominion died with him and the Norman Conquest quickly overshadowed his achievements, but Canute remains one of only two English kings to enjoy the title 'the Great'.

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