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Important events in the history of literature
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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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The material of the Eddas, taking shape in Iceland, derives from earlier sources in Norway, Britain and Burgundy
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William of Ockham advocates paring down arguments to their essentials, an approach later known as Ockham's Razor
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Marlowe and Shakespeare are born in the same year, with Marlowe the older by two months
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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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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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Laurence Sterne publishes the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy, beginning with the scene at the hero's conception
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A Gaelic pressure group, the Highland Association, is founded to preserve the indigenous poetry and music of Scotland
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In his poem Cargoes John Masefield compares a 'dirty British coaster' with two romantic boats from the past
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Virginia Woolf publishes the most fluid of her novels, The Waves, in which she tells the story through six interior monologues
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British economist Ernst Friedrich Schumacher publishes an influential economic tract, Small is Beautiful
