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Aug 22, 1485
Richard III is killed in battle
Richard III (2 October 1452 – 22 August 1485) was King of England for two years, from 1483 until his death in 1485 in the Battle of Bosworth Field. He was the last king of the House of York and the last of the Plantagenet dynasty. His defeat at Bosworth Field, the decisive battle of the Wars of the Roses, is sometimes regarded as the end of the Middle Ages in England. He is the subject of the play Richard III by William Shakespeare. -
Oct 22, 1492
Christopher Columbus reaches the Americas
Christopher Columbus was an Italian explorer, navigator, and colonizer, born in the Republic of Genoa, in what is today northwestern Italy.Under the auspices of the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, he completed four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean that led to general European awareness of the American continents. Those voyages, and his efforts to establish permanent settlements on the island of Hispaniola, initiated the Spanish colonization of the New World. -
Oct 22, 1503
Leonardo da Vinci paints the Mona Lisa
Mona Lisa is a half-length portrait of a woman by the artist Leonardo da Vinci, which has been acclaimed as "the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, the most parodied work of art in the world. The painting, thought to be a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, is in oil on a white Lombardy poplar panel, and is believed to have been painted between 1503 and 1506, although Leonardo may have continued working on it as late as 1517. -
Oct 22, 1516
Thomas More's Utopia is Published
The book is a frame narrative primarily depicting a fictional island society and its religious, social and political customs. A frame story is a literary technique that sometimes serves as a companion piece to a story within a story, whereby an introductory or main narrative is presented, at least in part, for the purpose of setting the stage either for a more emphasized second narrative or for a set of shorter stories. -
Oct 22, 1543
With the Supremecy Act, Henry VIII proclaims himself head of Church of England
Besides his six marriages, Henry VIII is known for his role in the separation of the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church. Henry's struggles with Rome led to the separation of the Church of England from papal authority, the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and his own establishment as the Supreme Head of the Church of England. Yet he remained a believer in core Catholic theological teachings, even after his excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church. -
Nov 17, 1558
Elizabeth I becomes queen of England
Elizabeth I (7 September 1533 – 24 March 1603) was queen regnant of England and Ireland from 17 November 1558 until her death. Sometimes called "The Virgin Queen", "Gloriana" or "Good Queen Bess", Elizabeth was the fifth and last monarch of the Tudor dynasty. The daughter of Henry VIII, she was born into the royal succession, but her mother, Anne Boleyn, was executed two and a half years after her birth, with Anne's marriage to Henry VIII being annulled, and Elizabeth hence declared illegitimate -
Apr 26, 1564
William Shakespeare, The Bard of Avon, is born
He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon". His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, and154 sonnets.His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the 16th century. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. -
Globe Theatre is built in London
The Globe Theatre was a theatre in London associated with William Shakespeare. It was built in 1599 by Shakespeare's playing company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, on land owned by Thomas Brend and inherited by his son, Nicholas Brend and grandson Sir Matthew Brend, and was destroyed by fire on 29 June 1613. A second Globe Theatre was built on the same site by June 1614 and closed in 1642. -
Shakespeare writes King Lear and Macbeth
King Lear and Macbeth are both tragedies by William Shakespeare. Tragedy is a form of drama based on human suffering that invokes in its audience an accompanying catharsis or pleasure in the viewing. King Lear is based on the legend of Leir of Britain, a mythological pre-Roman Celtic king. Macbeth is considered one of his darkest and most powerful tragedies. -
First permanent English settlement in North America is established at Jamestown, Virgina
Established by the Virginia Company of London as "James Fort" on May 24, 1607 (O.S., May 14, 1607 N.S.), and considered permanent after brief abandonment in 1610, it followed several earlier failed attempts, including the Lost Colony of Roanoke. Jamestown served as the capital of the colony for 83 years, from 1616 until 1699. The settlement was located within the territory of a political entity known as Tsenacommacah, the state of the Powhatan Confederacy, with around 14,000 native inhabitants. -
Shakespeare's sonnets are published
Shakespeare's sonnets are a collection of 154 sonnets, dealing with themes such as the passage of time, love, beauty and mortality. The sonnets are almost all constructed from three four-line stanzas (called quatrains) and a final couplet composed in iambic pentameter.This is also the meter used extensively in Shakespeare's plays. -
King James Bible is published
First printed by the King's Printer Robert Barker, this was the third translation into English to be approved by the English Church authorities. The first was the Great Bible commissioned in the reign of King Henry VIII, and the second was the Bishops' Bible of 1568. In January 1604, King James I convened the Hampton Court Conference where a new English version was conceived in response to the perceived problems of the earlier translations as detected by the Puritans, a faction within the Church -
The Mayflower lands at Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts
The Mayflower was the Pilgrim ship that in 1620 made the historic voyage from England to the New World. The ship carried 102 passengers in two core groups – religious Separatists coming from Holland and a largely non-religious settler group from London.This voyage has become an iconic story in the earliest annals of American history with its tragic story of death and of survival in the harshest New World winter environment. -
Newspapers are first published in London
Corante: or, Newes from Italy, Germany, Hungarie, Spaine and France was the first English newspaper.The earliest of the seven known surviving copies is dated September 24, 1621 (although John Chamberlain is on record as having complained about them in August), and the latest is dated October 22 of that same year. Thomas Archer, a printer in London, was arrested for distributing corantos without a license, and his printing press was shut down. -
John Milton begins Paradise Lost
Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton (1608-1674). An epic poem is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. It was originally published in 1667 in ten books, with a total of over ten thousand individual lines of verse. -
Puritan Commonwealth ends; monarchy is restored with Charles II
The Restoration of the English monarchy began when the English, Scottish and Irish monarchies were all restored under Charles II after the Interregnum that followed the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. The term Restoration is used to describe both the actual event by which the monarchy was restored, and the period of several years afterwards in which a new political settlement was established. It is very often used to cover the whole reign of Charles II (1660-1685).
