The Venerable Bede, in his monastery at Jarrow, completes his history of the English church and people

Beowulf, the first great work of Germanic literature, mingles the legends of Scandinavia with the experience in England of Angles and Saxons

The material of the Eddas, taking shape in Iceland, derives from earlier sources in Norway, Britain and Burgundy

Anselm includes in his Proslogion his famous 'ontological proof' of the existence of God

Duns Scotus, known as the Subtle Doctor in medieval times, later provides humanists with the name Dunsman or dunce

William of Ockham advocates paring down arguments to their essentials, an approach later known as Ockham's Razor

A narrator who calls himself Will, and whose name may be Langland, begins the epic poem of Piers Plowman

One of four new yeomen of the chamber in Edward III's household is Geoffrey Chaucer

The courtly poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight tells of a mysterious visitor to the round table of King Arthur

Chaucer completes Troilus and Criseyde, his long poem about a legendary love affair in ancient Troy

Chaucer begins an ambitious scheme for 100 Canterbury Tales, of which he completes only 24 by the time of his death

Thomas Malory, in gaol somewhere in England, compiles Morte d'Arthur – an English account of the French tales of King Arthur

Erasmus and Thomas More take the northern Renaissance in the direction of Christian humanism

William Tyndale studies in the university at Wittenberg and plans to translate the Bible into English

The first version of the English prayer book, or Book of Common Prayer, is published with text by Thomas Cranmer

Marlowe and Shakespeare are born in the same year, with Marlowe the older by two months

The Book of Common Prayer and the New Testament are published in Welsh, to be followed by the complete Bible in 1588

The 18-year-old William Shakespeare marries Anne Hathaway in Stratford-upon-Avon

Marlowe's first play, Tamburlaine the Great, introduces the swaggering blank verse of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama

English poet Edmund Spenser celebrates the Protestant Elizabeth I as The Faerie Queene

After tentative beginnings in the three parts of Henry VI, Shakespeare achieves his first masterpiece on stage with Richard III

Shakespeare's central character in Hamlet expresses both the ideals of the Renaissance and the disillusion of a less confident age

James I commissions the Authorized version of the Bible, which is completed by forty-seven scholars in seven years

Ben Jonson writes The Masque of Blackness, the first of his many masques for the court of James I

The satirical voice of the English playwright Ben Jonson is heard to powerful effect in Volpone