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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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Duns Scotus, known as the Subtle Doctor in medieval times, later provides humanists with the name Dunsman or dunce.
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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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A narrator who calls himself Will, and whose name may be Langland, begins the epic poem of Piers Plowman
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Chaucer completes Troilus and Criseyde, his long poem about a legendary love affair in ancient Troy
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Thomas Malory, in gaol somewhere in England, compiles Morte d'Arthur – an English account of the French tales of King Arthur
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Erasmus and Thomas More take the northern Renaissance in the direction of Christian humanism
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William Tyndale studies in the university at Wittenberg and plans to translate the Bible into English
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Marlowe's first play, Tamburlaine the Great, introduces the swaggering blank verse of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama
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Shakespeare's central character in Hamlet expresses both the ideals of the Renaissance and the disillusion of a less confident age
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John Smith publishes A Description of New England, an account of his exploration of the region in 1614
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John Milton's Lycidas is published in memory of a Cambridge friend, Edward King
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John Locke publishes his Essay concerning Human Understanding, arguing that all knowledge is based on experience
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Henry Fielding introduces a character of lasting appeal in the lusty but good-hearted Tom Jones
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17-year-old Thomas Chatterton, later hailed as a significant poet, commits suicide in a London garret
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Thomas Paine publishes his completed Age of Reason, an attack on conventional Christianity
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William Cobbett brings back to England the bones of Thomas Paine, who died in the USA in 1809
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London physician Peter Mark Roget publishes his dictionary of synonyms, the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases
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English author George Eliot wins fame with her first full-length novel, Adam Bede
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French-born artist and author George du Maurier publishes his novel Trilby
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Rudyard Kipling publishes his Just So Stories for Little Children
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James Joyce's novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man begins serial publication in a London journal, The Egoist
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Henry Williamson wins a wide readership with Tarka the Otter, a realistic story of the life and death of an otter in Devon
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John Maynard Keynes defines his economics in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
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Kingsley Amis and other young writers in Britain become known as Angry Young Men
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British author Roald Dahl publishes a novel for children, James and the Giant Peach
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Iris Murdoch publishes The Sea, the Sea, and wins the 1978 Booker Prize
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English author Julian Barnes publishes a multi-faceted literary novel, Flaubert's Parrot
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Louis de Bernières publishes Captain Corelli's Mandolin, a love story set in Italian-occupied Cephalonia
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Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen dramatizes the visit of Werner Heisenberg to Niels Bohr in wartime Denmark
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The Amber Spyglass completes Philip Pullman's trilogy, His Dark Materials
