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c 15th | c 16th | c 17th | c 18th | c 19th | c 20th | c 21st
15th century
Edward IV (ruled 1461-1483)
1474 In Bruges, William Caxton prints first book in English, History of Troy.
1477 First book printed in England, by Caxton on his Westminster wooden press. The Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres (Words of the Philosophers) was translated from French.
Edward V (ruled 1483)
Richard III (ruled 1483-1485)
Henry VII (ruled 1485-1509)
1492 Columbus discovers America.
16th century
1500 The start of the modern English language period.
Henry VIII (ruled 1509-1547)
1526 William Tyndale printed New Testament.
1530 Lutheran Christian position detailed in Augsburg Confession.
1534 Act of Supremacy – England's break with Rome. English monarch becomes supreme in both church and state.
1538 Henry VIII excommunicated by Pope Paul III and Henry begins licensing books.
1543 Copernicus publishes theory that planets revolve around the Sun.
Edward VI (ruled 1547-1553)
1549 Book of Common Prayer, edited by Thomas Cranmer, Henry VIII first Archbishop of Canterbury.
Mary I (ruled 1553-1558)
Elizabeth I (ruled 1558-1603)
1564-1642 Galileo Galilei. Theory of uniform acceleration. Uses telescope to support Copernican system and is excommunicated by Catholic Church.
1588 England's defeat of Catholic King Philip of Spain's Armada. The way begins to open to Britain's colonial expansion throughout the globe.
1594 Thomas Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller one of the earliest English picaresque stories, which begin to lay the foundations for the later development of the novel.
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17th century
James I (ruled 1603-1625)
1605 Don Quixote, by Spanish writer Cervantes. About a madman living by chivalric illusions, it is seen by many to be the most important single ancestor of the modern novel.
1611 King James or Authorised Version of the Bible.
1618-1648 Thirty Years War in Europe between Catholic and Protestant powers.
Charles I (ruled 1625-1649)
1628 Englishman William Harvey (1578-1657) writes of his discovery of circulation of the blood and the pumping action of the heart.
Cromwell, the Commonwealth and the Protectorate (governed 1649-1660)
1651 Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan. He asserts that a powerful state is inevitable because without human selfishness would mean life would be 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short'.
Charles II (ruled 1660-85)
1660 Birth of Daniel Defoe.
1660-1669 Diary of Samuel Pepys (1633-1703).
1665 Great Plague destroys much of London's population.
1666 After the Great Fire of London, Christopher Wren is appointed to run the rebuilding of the City.
1667 Milton's Paradise Lost.
1678 Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.
James II (ruled 1685-1688)
1687 Newton's Principia Mathematica.
William III and Mary II (ruled 1688-1702)
1688 Aphra Behn's Oroonoko is published. Telling the story of the violence of the slave trade, it is one of the earliest examples of English literature by a woman.
1689 John Locke argues that Parliament needs to be divided into the executive and legislature. Bill of Rights and Toleration Act. Birth of Samuel Richardson.
1695 Press allowed to become free.
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18th century
Queen Anne (ruled 1702-1714)
1702 Daily newspaper appears for first time.
1707 The Act of Union unites Scotland and England. Birth of Henry Fielding.
1713 Birth of Laurence Sterne.
George I (ruled 1714-1727)
1719 Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.
1721 Robert Walpole, a Whig, becomes Great Britain's first prime minister.
1722 Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders.
1726 Swift's Gulliver's Travels.
George II (ruled 1727-1760)
Wars with France over, inter alia, colonies in America and India through which Britain wins huge areas of land. William Pitt is prime minister.
1728 Gay's Beggar's Opera.
1738 Methodism is born, largely thanks to preacher John Wesley (1703-1791).
1740 Pamela or Virtue Rewarded, by Samuel Richardson.
1746 Jacobite Rebellion.
1749 Henry Fielding's Tom Jones.
1750 Conquest of India begins.
1755 Dr Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) publishes his English dictionary.
1758 Voltaire's Candide mocks the religious establishment. Shortly afterwards Jean-Jacques Rousseau publishe Emile and Social Contract.
George III (ruled 1760-1820)
1764 Birth of Ann Radcliffe.
1768 Colonial expansion continues as Captain James Cook travels to South Pacific.
1771 Birth of Walter Scott.
1773 Boston Tea Party. American colonists throw tea cargos into sea in protest at British tax.
1774 Reforms to prisons begun at the behest of Howard. Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther.
1775 American war of independence from Britain begins. American Declaration of Independence follows in 1776. War with America continues until 1783. James Watt invents steam engine. The pace of industrialisation and urbanisation accelerates as a result. Birth of Jane Austen.
1789 French Revolution. Although there was the Treaty of Paris in 1783, war between France and Britain again flares.
1789-1832 Romantic period in the arts emphasises individuality, subjectivity and irrationality, rejecting the rationalism of the earlier Enlightenment.
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19th century
1801 Great Britain and Ireland (only Northern Ireland from 1921) united to form the United Kingdom.
1802 Australia colonised.
1804 Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) is Emperor of France.
1805 Battle of Trafalgar – Admiral Horatio Nelson (1758-1805) defeats French.
1807 Slave trade abolished.
1810 Birth of Elizabeth Gaskell.
1811 Luddites begin protests of breaking machines in factories to win better rights. Birth of William Thackeray.
1812 Birth of Charles Dickens.
1813 Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.
1814 George Stephenson invents railway locomotive.
1815 Battle of Waterloo. Duke of Wellington (1769-1852) (the Iron Duke, who also later becomes prime minister 1828-1830 and 1834) wins against France. Napoleonic wars end with Britain as dominant European power.
1816 Birth of Charlotte Bronte.
1818 Birth of Emily Bronte.
1819 Peterloo Massacre. Eleven people are killed and 500 injured when Manchester yeomanry (volunteer cavalry) put down a peaceful political protest. Scott's Ivanhoe. Steamship crosses Atlantic for first time. Birth of George Eliot and Herman Melville.
George IV (ruled 1820-1830)
1824 British government recognises trade unions. Birth of Wilkie Collins.
1826 Establishment of the Temperance Society. World's first photograph produced by French doctor Nicephore Niépce (1765-1833).
1829 Catholic Emancipation Act. Illegal to discriminate against Catholics.
William IV (ruled 1830-1837)
1830 Railways begin.
1833 Slaves set free. Child labour regulated and workhouses, homes with compulsory labour, introduced for down and outs under Poor Laws.
1834 A national education system is introduced. Tolpuddle Martyrs (protestors at poor labour conditions) transported to Australia.
Victoria (Queen and Empress of India 1837-1901)
1837 Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist.
1839 Chartists call for more democracy in People's Charter.
1840 Edgar Allen Poe's Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. Queen Victoria marries Prince Albert, Duke of Saxony, Prince of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Birth of Thomas Hardy.
1843 Birth of Henry James.
1844 Telegraph developed by Morse.
1845 Irish potato famine.
1846 Repeal of Corn Laws.
1847 Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. Karl Marx (1818-1883) publishes Communist Manifesto. He comes to live in England from 1849 and over the following 140 years Marxism would become increasingly influential.
1848 Revolutions around Europe, but they are mostly suppressed.
1849 Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.
1853 Crimean War. Ends in 1856.
1857 Indian Mutiny leads to British government takeover of East India Company. Birth of Joseph Conrad.
1859 Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. JS Mill's On Liberty.
1860 George Eliot's Mill on the Floss. Dickens' Great Expectations.
1861 American Civil War. Ends in 1865.
1865 Birth of Rudyard Kipling.
1866 Birth of HG Wells.
1868 Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone.
1870 Government sets up schools. All children between 5 and 13 years old must go to school.
1871 Middlemarch, by Eliot.
1873 Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.
1874 Birth of Somerset Maugham.
1876 Alexander Graham Bell gives first public demonstration of the telephone.
1878 Salvation Army established by Methodists William and Catherine Booth (1829-1912 and 1829-1890).
1879 Birth of EM Forster.
1881 Public electricity supply starts in Surrey.
1882 Birth of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.
1884 Oxford English Dictionary.
1885 Benz builds and runs first motorcar, after the first internal combustion engine had been developed early in the 19th century. By early in the 20th century Henry Ford becomes the first person to mass-produce the new vehicles. Birth of DH Lawrence.
1892 Birth of Rebecca West.
1893 Independent Labour Party established under Keir Hardie
1896 Jude The Obscure, by Hardy.
1897 Alexander Graham Bell invents gramophone that takes over from Thomas Edison's earlier phonograph. Birth of William Faulkner.
1898 Henry James' The Turn of the Screw. HG Wells' War of the Worlds.
1899 Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams. Birth of Ernest Hemingway.
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20th century
1900 Conrad's Lord Jim.
Edward VII (ruled 1901-1910)
1901 Marconi transmits radio waves from Poldhu in Cornwall to Newfoundland.
1902 Birth of John Steinbeck.
1903 First flight in heavier than air machine achieved by Wright brothers, who pioneer powered flying. Birth of George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh.
1904 Birth of Graham Greene.
1905 Birth of John-Paul Sartre.
1906 Labour Party established under Ramsay MacDonald.
1907 George Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara.
George V (ruled 1910-1936)
1911 Suffragette campaign, demanding women's votes, at its height. Birth of William Golding.
1914 First World War begins and ends in 1918.
1915 Birth of Saul Bellow.
1916 Irish protest at British presence ends in Easter Rising and the English execution of rebels. Dada international movement rebels against artistic conventions and emphasises the absurd.
1917 George V adopts the name Windsor during the First World War when Britain's enemy is Germany and the Germanic names such as the House of Saxe-Coburg are thought problematic. Russian Revolution. Communists come to power. Birth of Anthony Burgess.
1918 Birth of Muriel Spark.
1919 Birth of JD Salinger and Iris Murdoch.
1921 Birth of Brian Moore.
1922 Irish Free State in southern Ireland. Birth of Jack Kerouac and Kinglsey Amis.
1923 Birth of Joseph Heller.
1924 Ramsay MacDonald first Labour prime minister.
1926 General strike in Britain. Birth of John Fowles.
1928 Women get the vote. Birth of Alan Sillitoe.
1929 Birth of John Osborne.
1931 Birth of Toni Morrison.
1932 Oswald Mosley forms British Union of Fascists. Ultimately, despite some high-level backing, he fails to gain widespread support. Birth of VS Naipaul, John Updike and Malcolm Bradbury.
1933 Adolf Hitler made German chancellor even though he fails in the previous year to win presidential elections. Birth of Philip Roth.
1934 Birth of Alasdair Gray.
Edward VIII (ruled 1936)
George VI (ruled 1936-1952)
1936 Spanish Civil War starts after military rising against popular left-wing government. With support from fascists throughout Europe, right-wing General Franco victorious. BBC station at Alexandra Palace, London transmits world's first public television service. Birth of Antonia Byatt.
1939 Second World War begins when Germany invades Poland after previously annexing Austria and invading Czechoslovakia. Birth of Margaret Atwood and Margaret Drabble
1940 Winston Churchill becomes leader of National Government.
1943 Birth of Peter Carey.
1944 Birth of Alice Walker.
1945 Allies defeat Germany and later Japan, after the US uses atomic bombs for the first time. Labour wins general election. Clement Attlee prime minister and much nationalisation of key industries, such as rail, follows. Because of the cost of the war, austerity measures continued for several years to come and rationing was also retained for some time.
1946 National Health Service established – health care free at the point of delivery.
1947 Indian independence from Britain. Birth of Salman Rushdie.
1948 Birth of Ian McEwan.
1949 Birth of Martin Amis.
Elizabeth II (ruled 1952-)
1952 Birth of Hanif Kureishi.
1956 Suez War. Israel fights Egypt for Suez Canal after being encouraged into the conflict by France and Britain.
1958 Birth of Roddy Doyle.
1959 Birth of Ben Okri.
1961 Berlin Wall built.
1962 Assassination of US President John F Kennedy. Beatles first single 'Love Me Do'.
1965 Vietnam War begins as Americans enter the country against communists. In 1972 American effort ends in embarrassing failure.
1969 Moon-landing by US astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.
1971 Conservative prime minister Edward Heath takes Britain into European Economic Community.
1979 Conservative Margaret Thatcher elected first woman prime minister and aggressive commerce-led policies follow.
1982 War with Argentina over invasion of Falkland islands.
1984 Miners' strike ends in humiliating defeat for union.
1989 With the bringing down of the Berlin Wall the former Soviet Union crumbles after Mikhail Gorbachev's policies of Perestroika (openness).
1994 Ceasefire in Northern Ireland troubles. After it breaks down in 1996 the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 again brings peace. Spread of the Internet and email systems leads to dot.com frenzy of setting up web-based companies.
1997 Labour returned to office under Tony Blair after 18 years in opposition.
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21st century
2001 September 11, terrorists fly passenger aeroplanes into New York World Trade Center twin towers, killing 3,000 people.
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