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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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Beowulf, the first great work of Germanic literature, mingles the legends of Scandinavia with the experience in England of Angles and Saxons.
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A narrator who calls himself Will, and whose name may be Langland, begins the epic poem of Piers Plowman
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Chaucer completes Troilus and Criseyde, his long poem about a legendary love affair in ancient Troy.
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Chaucer begins an ambitious scheme for 100 Canterbury Tales, of which he completes only 24 by the time of his death.
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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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The Book of Common Prayer and the New Testament are published in Welsh, to be followed by the complete Bible in 1588.
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English poet Edmund Spenser celebrates the Protestant Elizabeth I as The Faerie Queene.
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William Shakespeare the greates of writers Romeo and Juliet, MacBeth, king Lear
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The satirical voice of the English playwright Ben Jonson is heard to powerful effect in Volpone.
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Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, with its detailed realism, can be seen as the first English novel.
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Oliver Goldsmith's play She Stoops to Conquer is produced in London's Covent Garden theatre.
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English historian Edward Gibbon publishes the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
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English poets Wordsworth and Coleridge jointly publish Lyrical Ballads, a milestone in the Romantic movement.
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English author Jane Austen publishes her first work in print, Sense and Sensibility, at her own expense.
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Percy Bysshe Shelley publishes probably his best-known poem, the sonnet Ozymandias.
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English poet John Keats publishes Ode to a Nightingale, inspired by the bird's song in his Hampstead garden.
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The Victorian era or Victorian era in the history of the United Kingdom marked the cusp of its Industrial Revolution and the British Empire. Authors of this period Charles Dickens, Tennyson y Matthew Arnold.
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Charles Dickens' first novel, Oliver Twist, begins monthly publication (in book form, 1838).
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Oscar Wilde publishes his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray in which the ever-youthful hero's portrait grows old and ugly.
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The Belgian detective Hercule Poirot features in Agatha Christie's first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles.
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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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A schoolboy wizard performs his first tricks in J.K Rowling Harry Potter and the Philosopher stone.
