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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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The courtly poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight tells of a mysterious visitor to the round table of King Arthur
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James I commissions the Authorized version of the Bible, which is completed by forty-seven scholars in seven years
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On the first day of the new year Samuel Pepys gets up late, eats the remains of the turkey and begins his diary, Samuel Pepys ends his diary, after only writing it for nine years
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David Hume publishes his Treatise of Human Nature, in which he applies to the human mind the principles of experimental science
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English historian Edward Gibbon publishes the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
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Percy Bysshe Shelley publishes probably his best-known poem, the sonnet Ozymandias Two of Jane Austen's novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, are published in the year after her death
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Charles Dickens begins the publication in monthly numbers of David Copperfield, his own favourite among his novels
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W.B. Yeats founds the National Literary Society in Dublin, with Douglas Hyde as its first president W.B. Yeats publishes a short play The Countess Cathleen, his first contribution to Irish poetic drama
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Richard Hughes publishes his first novel, A High Wind in Jamaica
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British physicist Stephen Hawking explains the cosmos for the general reader in A Brief History of Time: from the Big Bang to Black Holes
