English poets

British Literature

By epic
  • May 3, 653

    Celtic church begins to spread Christianity amoung people living in Severn Valley

  • May 3, 664

    Synod of Whitby establishes Roman Church in England

  • May 3, 731

    Bede completes A History of the English Church and People

  • May 3, 750

    Surviving version of Beowulf composed

  • May 5, 1040

    Macbeth kills Duncan I

  • May 5, 1042

    Edward the Confessor becomes king of Saxons

  • May 5, 1066

    Normans defeat Saxons at Hastings

  • May 5, 1073

    Canterbury becomes England's religious center

  • May 5, 1130

    Oxford becomes a center for learning

  • May 5, 1215

    King John forced to sign Magna Carta

  • May 5, 1233

    First coal mined at Newcastle

  • May 5, 1258

    First commoners allowed in Parliament

  • May 5, 1272

    Edward I becomes king

  • May 5, 1277

    England conquers Wales

  • May 5, 1295

    Edward I assembles Model Parliament

  • May 5, 1337

    Beginning of Hundred Years' War with France

  • May 5, 1348

    Black Death begins sweeping through England

  • May 5, 1375

    Surviving version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight written

  • May 5, 1381

    Bible first translated into English

  • May 5, 1381

    Peasants' Revolt

  • May 5, 1386

    Chaucer begins writing The Canterbury Tales

  • May 5, 1455

    The War of the Roses

  • May 5, 1470

    Thomas Malory writes Morte d' Arthur

  • May 5, 1485

    Henry VII becomes the first Tudor king.

  • Period: May 5, 1485 to

    The English Renaissance

  • May 5, 1500

    Everyman first performed

  • May 5, 1512

    First masque performed

  • May 5, 1516

    Thomas More publishes Utopia

  • May 5, 1534

    Henry VIII issues Act of Supremacy

  • May 5, 1534

    Church of England established

  • May 5, 1535

    Thomas More executed

  • May 5, 1541

    John Knox leads Calvinist reformation in Scotland

  • May 5, 1547

    Henry VIII dies

  • May 5, 1549

    The Book of Common Prayer issued

  • May 5, 1558

    Elizabeth I becomes queen

  • May 5, 1560

    Thomas Tallis publishes English cathedral music

  • May 5, 1563

    More than 20,000 Londoners die in plague

  • May 5, 1564

    William Shakespeare born

    William Shakespeare born
  • May 5, 1580

    Francis Drake returns from circumnavigating the globe

  • May 5, 1582

    Sir Philip Sydney writes Astrophel and Stella

  • English navy defeats Spanish Armada

  • Edmund Spenser publishes The Faerie Queene, Part I

  • Shakespeare writes Romeo and Juliet

  • Globe theater opens

  • East India Company founded

  • Elizabeth I dies

  • Guy Fawkes executed for Gunpowder Plot

  • Royal debt amounts to more than 600,000

  • The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser is published in its entirety

  • King James Bible published

  • Francis Bacon publishes Novum Organum

  • First patent laws passed

  • James I dies

  • Period: to

    Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries

  • Sir Francis Bacon publishes The New Atlantis

  • John Donne's Songs and Sonnets published

  • John Milton publishes Lycidas

  • John Suckling publishes Fragmenta Aurea

  • Robert Herrick publishes Hesperides

  • Richard Lovelace publishes Lucasta

  • Samuel Pepys begins Diary

  • John Milton's Paradise Lost published

  • Alaxander Pope publishes The Rape of the Lock

  • Daniel Defoe publishes Robinson Crusoe

  • Anglo-Saxon Invasion

  • St. Augustine founds Christian monastery at Canterbury, Kent

  • Vikings attack Lindisfarne

  • Alfred the Great becomes King of Wessex

  • Saxon monks copy Old English poems into The Exeter Book

  • English defeated by Danes at Battle of Maldon

  • Period: to May 3, 1470

    Old English