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1066
A.D. 1066 period 1. Britons and Anglo Saxons
The BRITONS; the present English race has gradually shaped itself out of several distinct peoples which successively occupied or conquered the island of Great Britain. -
1066
A.D. 1066 to about 1350 period II, the Norman French period.
The Normans who conquered England were originally members of the same stock as the 'Danes' who had harried and conquered it in the preceding centuries, the ancestors of both were bands of
Baltic and North Sea pirates who merely happened to emigrate in different directions; and a little farther back, the Normans were close cousins, in the general Germanic family, of the Anglo−Saxons themselves, -
1350
A.D. About 1350 to about 1500 Period III The end of the middle ages
The middle of the fourteenth century was also the middle of the externally brilliant fifty years' reign of Edward III. In 1337 Edward had begun the terrible though often−interrupted series of campaigns in France, which historians group together as the Hundred Tears' War, and having won the battle of Crecy against amazing odds, he had inaugurated at his court a period of splendor and luxury. -
1550
A.D. The Medieval Drama.
JUGGLERS, FOLK−PLAYS, PAGEANTS. At the fall of the Roman Empire, which marks the beginning of the Middle Ages, the corrupt Roman drama, proscribed by the Church, had come to an unhonored end, and the actors had been merged into the great body of disreputable jugglers and inferior minstrels who wandered over all Christendom. The performances of these social outcasts, crude and immoral as they were, -
1551
Sixteen Century, period V the Renaissance and the Reign of Elizabeth. About 1550 to 1642, period VI the drama.
THE RENAISSANCE. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are the period of the European Renaissance or New Birth, one of the three or four great transforming movements of European history. This impulse by which the medieval society of scholasticism, feudalism, and chivalry was to be made over into what we call the modern world came first from Italy. Italy, -
1603 – 1660, the Seventeenth Century, period V, prose and poetry.
The first new formative force was the influence of the classical drama, for which, with other things classical, the Renaissance had aroused enthusiasm. This force operated mainly not through writers for popular audiences, like the authors of most Moralities and Interludes, but through men of the schools and the universities, writing for performances in their own circles or in that of the Court. -
1660-1700, Period VI, the Restoration.
PROSE FICTION. The period saw the beginning, among other things, of English prose fiction of something like the later modern type. First appeared a series of collections of short tales chiefly translated from Italian authors, to which tales the Italian name 'novella' (novel) was applied. Most of the separate tales are crude or
amateurish and have only historical interest, though as a class they furnished the plots for many Elizabethan dramas. -
1700. Eighteenth Century, period VII, Pseudo-Classicism and beginnings of Modern Romanticism.
The first half of the seventeenth century as a whole, compared with the Elizabethan age, was a period of relaxing vigor. The Renaissance enthusiasm had spent itself, and in place of the danger and glory which had long united the nation there followed increasing dissension in religion and politics and uncertainty as to the future of England and, indeed, as to the whole purpose of life. Through increased experience men were certainly wiser and more sophisticated than before. -
1798 to about 1830, period VIII the Romantic Triumph.
THE GREAT WRITERS OF 1798−1830. THE CRITICAL REVIEWS. As we look back to−day over the literature of the last three quarters of the eighteenth century, here just surveyed, the progress of the Romantic Movement seems the most conspicuous general fact which it presents. But at the, death of Cowper in 1800 the movement still remained tentative and incomplete, and it was to arrive at full maturity only in the work of the great writers of the following quarter century. -
About 1830 to 1901, period IX, the Victorian Period.
Before the accession of Queen Victoria the 'industrial revolution,' the vast development of manufacturing made possible in the latter part of the eighteenth century by the introduction of coal and the steam engine, had rendered England the richest nation in the world, and the movement continued with steadily accelerating momentum throughout the period. -
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Beginning as early as the latter part of the eighteenth century literary production, thanks largely to the tremendous increase of education and of newspapers and magazines, has steadily grown, until now it has reached bewildering volume and complexity, in which the old principles are partly merged together and the new tendencies, for contemporary observers, at least, scarcely stand out with decisive distinctness. Most significant to−day, perhaps, are the spirit of independence.
