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The origins of the English language lie in today's England and the arrival of Anglo-Saxon tribes from Central Europe to the British Isles in 400 AD.
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Bede gave a precise date, 449AD, for the first arrival of the Anglo-Saxons and he said they came from three tribes: the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, who themselves came from different parts of Germany and Denmark.
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An Old English epic poem consisting of 3182 alliterative long lines. It is possibly the oldest surviving long poem in Old English and is commonly cited as one of the most important works of Old English literature.
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Danelaw was created by treaties signed between Alfred the Great of Wessex, and the Viking warlord Guthrum, following Alfred's victory at the Battle of Edington in 878.
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King Edgar came to power in 959, uniting a fractured England and introducing a period of calm and stability, something unheard of in medieval kingship.
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The Norman conquest in 1066 was the last successful conquest of England.
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The Sixth Crusade (1228–1229), also known as the Crusade of Frederick II, was a military expedition to recapture Jerusalem and the rest of the Holy Land.
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The Canterbury Tales (Middle English: Tales of Caunterbury) is a collection of twenty-four stories that runs to over 17,000 lines written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer.
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The Hundred Years' War was a long struggle between England and France over succession to the French throne.
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The Black Death was a bubonic plague pandemic occurring in Western Eurasia and North Africa from 1346 to 1353. It is the most fatal pandemic recorded.
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The printing press is often said to have been created by Gutenberg in Mainz, and it began taking root in Europe in the 1450s with the printing of the aforementioned Bible.
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Christopher Columbus is credited with discovering the Americas in 1492.
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Printed in the large "folio" size, the First Folio is the first collected edition of the plays of William Shakespeare.
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King James Version, KJV, known as the King James Bible (KJB) or simply the Authorized Version (AV), is the English translation of the Christian Bible for the Church of England.
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The American Revolution—also called the U.S. War of Independence—was the insurrection, which 13 of Great Britain's North American colonies threw off British rule to establish the sovereign United States of America.
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The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is the main historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press.
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World War II was the biggest and deadliest war in history, involving more than 30 countries. Sparked by the 1939 Nazi invasion of Poland, the war dragged on for six bloody years until the Allies defeated the Axis powers of Nazi Germany.