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The first anglo-saxon written literature, oral tradition, poetry, strong believe in faith, moral instruction through lierature, and admiration to heroic warriors.
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In his monastery at Jarrow, completes his history of the English church and people
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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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Ttaking shape in Iceland, derives from earlier sources in Norway, Britain and Burgundy
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known as the Subtle Doctor in medieval times, later provides humanists with the name Dunsman or dunce
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Advocates paring down arguments to their essentials, an approach later known as Ockham's Razor
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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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Sir Gawain and the Green Knight tells of a mysterious visitor to the round table of King Arthur
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his long poem about a legendary love affair in ancient Troy
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of which he completes only 24 by the time of his death
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in gaol somewhere in England compiles Morte d'Arthur – an English account of the French tales of King Arthur
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They take the northern Renaissance in the direction of Christian humanism
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and plans to translate the Bible into English
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The first version of the English prayer book, or Book of Common Prayer, is published with text by Thomas Cranmer
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in the same year with Marlowe the older by two months
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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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The 18-year-old William Shakespeare marries Anne Hathaway in Stratford-upon-Avon
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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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English poet Edmund Spenser celebrates the Protestant Elizabeth I as The Faerie Queene
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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 ag
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James I commissions the Authorized version of the Bible, which is completed by forty-seven scholars in seven years
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the first of his many masques for the court of James I
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an account of his exploration of the region in 1614
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his home in Stratford-upon-Avon, and is buried in Holy Trinity Church
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Paradise Lost is published, earning its author John Milton just £10
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John Locke publishes his Essay concerning Human Understanding, arguing that all knowledge is based on experience
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claiming comparison with the equivalent flowering under Augustus Caesar
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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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in which he applies to the human mind the principles of experimental scienc
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English poet Thomas Gray publishes his Elegy written in a Country Church Yard
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A Society of Gentlemen in Scotland begins publication of the immensely successful Encyclopaedia Britannica
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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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his reply to Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France
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English author Mary Wollstonecraft publishes a passionately feminist work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
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English poets Wordsworth and Coleridge jointly publish Lyrical Ballads, a milestone in the Romantic movement
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the long romantic poem that first brings him fame
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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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Byron begins publication in parts of his longest poem, Don Juan an epic satirical comment on contemporary life
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inspired by the bird's song in his Hampstead garden
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English author William Hazlitt publishes Table Talk, a two-volume collection that includes most of his best-known essays
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begins monthly publication (in book form, 1838)
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Friedrich Engels, after running a textile factory in Manchester, publishes The Condition of the Working Class in England
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Emily Brontë's novel Wuthering Heights follows just two months after her sister Charlotte's Jane Eyre
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Charles Dickens begins the publication in monthly numbers of David Copperfield, his own favourite among his novels
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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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romantic translations of the work of the Persian poet
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Charles Dickens begins serial publication of his novel "Great Expectations" (in book form 1861
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Mrs Henry Wood publishes her first novel, East Lynne, which becomes the basis of the most popular of all Victorian melodramas
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Lewis Carroll publishes Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a development of the story he had told Alice Liddell three years earlie
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The first volume of Das Kapital is completed by Marx in London and is published in Hamburg
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English author Thomas Hardy has his first success with his novel Far from the Madding Crowd
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protesting at massacre by the Turks, sells 200,000 copies within a month
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Robert Louis Stevenson's adventure story, Treasure Island, features Long John Silver and Ben Gunn
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Robert Louis Stevenson introduces a dual personality in his novel The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
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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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Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book surrounds the child Mowgli with a collection of vivid animal guardians
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Oscar Wilde's most brilliant comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest is performed in London's St. James Theatre
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English author Bram Stoker publishes Dracula, his gothic tale of vampirism in Transylvania
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Beatrix Potter publishes at her own expense The Tale of Peter Rabbit
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Erskine Childers has a best-seller in The Riddle of the Sands, a thriller about a planned German invasion of Britain
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Bernard Shaw has two new plays opening in London in the same year, Major Barbara and Man and Superman
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After years of delay James Joyce's Dubliners, a collection of short stories, is published
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The English writer Virginia Woolf publishes her first novel, The Voyage Out
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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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C.S. Lewis gives the first glimpse of Narnia in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
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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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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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Roald Dahl publishes a fantasy treat for a starving child, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
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British physicist Stephen Hawking explains the cosmos for the general reader in A Brief History of Time: from the Big Bang to Black Holes
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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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The Amber Spyglass completes Philip Pullman's trilogy, His Dark Materials
