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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 begins an ambitious scheme for 100 Canterbury Tales, of which he completes only 24 by the time of his death
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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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The first version of the English prayer book, or Book of Common Prayer, is published with text by Thomas Cranmer
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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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English poet Edmund Spenser celebrates the Protestant Elizabeth I as The Faerie Queene
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Shakespeare's central character in Hamlet expresses both the ideals of the Renaissance and the disillusion of a less confident a
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Ben Jonson writes The Masque of Blackness, the first of his many masques for the court of James I
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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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Laurence Sterne publishes the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy, beginning with the scene at the hero's conception
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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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William Blake publishes Songs of Innocence, a volume of his poems with every page etched and illustrated by himself
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Walter Scott publishes The Lay of the Last Minstrel, the long romantic poem that first brings him fame
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English poet John Keats publishes Ode to a Nightingale, inspired by the bird's song in his Hampstead garden
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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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Mrs Henry Wood publishes her first novel, East Lynne, which becomes the basis of the most popular of all Victorian melodramas
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Oxford University Press publishes the A volume of its New English Dictionary, which will take 37 years to reach Z
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Joseph Conrad publishes his novel Lord Jim about a life of failure and redemption in the far East
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Caribbean-born author Jean Rhys publishes her first novel, Postures, based on her affair with the writer Ford Madox Ford
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Virginia Woolf publishes the most fluid of her novels, The Waves, in which she tells the story through six interior monologues
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British author Rebecca West publishes an account of Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
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Roald Dahl publishes a fantasy treat for a starving child, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
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English author Julian Barnes publishes a multi-faceted literary novel, Flaubert's Parrot
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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
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English novelist Sebastian Faulks publishes Birdsong, set partly in the trenches of World War I
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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
