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The Venerable Bede, in his monastery at Jarrow, completes his history of the English church and people
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Chaucer completes Troilus and Criseyde, his long poem about a legendary love affair in ancient Troy,
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Thomas Malory, in gaol somewhere in England, compiles Morte d'Arthur – an English account of the French tales of King Arthur
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Erasmus and Thomas More take the northern Renaissance in the direction of Christian humanism
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William Tyndale studies in the university at Wittenberg and plans to translate the Bible into English
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After tentative beginnings in the three parts of Henry VI, Shakespeare achieves his first masterpiece on stage with Richard III
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Shakespeare's central character in Hamlet expresses both the ideals of the Renaissance and the disillusion of a less confident age
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Shakespeare's sonnets, written ten years previously, are published
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Paradise Lost is published, earning its author John Milton just £10
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Part I of The Pilgrim's Progress, written during John Bunyan's two spells in Bedford Gaol, is published and is immediately popular
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Samuel Richardson's Clarissa begins the correspondence that grows into the longest novel in the English language
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Samuel Johnson publishes his magisterial Dictionary of the English Language
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Thomas Paine publishes the first part of The Rights of Man, his reply to Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France
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London physician Peter Mark Roget publishes his dictionary of synonyms, the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases
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Charles Darwin puts forward the theory of evolution in On the Origin of Species, the result of 20 years' research
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Lewis Carroll publishes Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a development of the story he had told Alice Liddell three years earlier
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Oxford University Press publishes the A volume of its New English Dictionary, which will take 37 years to reach Z
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Politician and author Winston Churchill completes his six-volume history The Second World War
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British philologist J.R.R. Tolkien publishes the third and final volume of his epic fantasy The Lord of the Rings
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James Bond, agent 007, has a licence to kill in Ian Fleming's first novel, Casino Royale
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English poet Thom Gunn's The Man with Night Sweats deals openly with AIDS
