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700 - Approximate date of the earliest manuscript records of Old English
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600 - Ethelbert, the King of Kent, is baptized. He is the first English king to convert to Christianity.
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673 - The birth of the Venerable Bede, the monk who composed The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, a key source of information about Anglo Saxon settlement.
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1000 - suspected date of Beowulf's writings, it is known that the only manuscript that remains is from circa 1000 AD
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1066 - The Norman Invasion (Norman French becomes the language of the courts and of the upper classes; English remains the language of the majority)
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1171 - Henry II declares himself overlord of Ireland, introducing Norman French and English to the country. About this time the University of Oxford is founded.
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1215 - King John Signs the Magna Carta, a critical document in the long historical process leading to the rule of constitutional law in the English-speaking world.
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1340-1400 - Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, a collection of 24 stories that runs to over 17,000 lines written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer.
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1399 - At his coronation, King Henry IV becomes the first English monarch to deliver a speech in English.
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1492 - The discovery of North America
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1500 - The invention of the Printing Press (enabled the mass production of books and the rapid dissemination of knowledge throughout Europe)
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1623 - Publication of Shakespeare's First Folio
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1755 - Samuel Johnson publishes his two-volume Dictionary of the English Language.
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1775 - The American Revolution, The American Patriots in the Thirteen Colonies won independence from Great Britain, becoming the United States of America.
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1844 - The telegraph is invented by Samuel Morse, inaugurating the development of rapid communication, a major influence on the growth and spread of English.
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2012 - The fifth volume of the Dictionary of American Regional English is published by Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
