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Starts the old English period
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The venerable Bede
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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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Ends the old English period, starts the middle english.
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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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This poem tells of a mysterious visitor to the round table of King Arthur
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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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Start English Renaissance period
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William Tyndale studies in the university at Wittenberg and plans to translate the Bible into English.
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Marlowe and Shakespeare are born in the same year, with Marlowe the older by two months
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Marlowe's first play, Tamburlaine the Great, introduces the swaggering blank verse of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama
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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 last completed play, The Tempest, is performed
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The poems of Massachusetts author Anne Bradstreet are published in London under the title The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America
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Stars the Puritan period
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Devoted fisherman Izaak Walton publishes the classic work on the subject, The Compleat Angler
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Start Restoration Age
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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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English poet Thomas Gray publishes his Elegy written in a Country Church Yard.
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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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Jonathan Swift sends his hero on a series of bitterly satirical travels in Gulliver's Travels
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A Society of Gentlemen in Scotland begins publication of the immensely successful Encyclopaedia Britannica
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William Blake publishes Songs of Innocence, a volume of his poems with every page etched and illustrated by himself
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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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Start the Romanticism period
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English author Jane Austen publishes her first work in print.
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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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Start the Victorian period
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Charles Dickens' first novel, Oliver Twist, begins monthly publication
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Ebenezer Scrooge mends his ways just in time in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol
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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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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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J.M Barrie's play for children Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up has its premiere in London
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Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore and the others make their first appearance in A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh
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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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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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Roald Dahl publishes a fantasy treat for a starving child, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
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A schoolboy wizard performs his first tricks in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
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