From the Norman Conquest and the Domesday Book through the Angevin Empire, Magna Carta, the rise of Parliament, the conquest of Wales, the Black Death, and the Hundred Years War, to the Wars of the Roses and the end of the Plantagenets at Bosworth Field. Slide across the centuries to read the major events that shaped medieval England.
On Christmas Day Duke William of Normandy is crowned king of England in Edward the Confessor's new abbey, while his guards outside, mistaking the cheers for a riot, set fire to nearby houses.
From the Norman Conquest and the Domesday Book through the Angevin Empire, Magna Carta, the rise of Parliament, the conquest of Wales, the Black Death, and the Hundred Years War, to the Wars of the Roses and the end of the Plantagenets at Bosworth Field. Slide across the centuries to read the major events that shaped medieval England.
On Christmas Day Duke William of Normandy is crowned king of England in Edward the Confessor's new abbey, while his guards outside, mistaking the cheers for a riot, set fire to nearby houses.
William commissions a comprehensive survey of his new kingdom — every manor, every plough, every mill, valued before the Conquest and now. The English called it 'Domesday' because, like the Last Judgement, there was no appeal from its verdict.
After his brother William Rufus is killed by an arrow in the New Forest, Henry seizes the throne and issues a Coronation Charter promising to abolish the abuses of his predecessor. The document is the distant ancestor of Magna Carta.
Henry I's nephew Stephen of Blois seizes the throne against the claim of Henry's daughter Empress Matilda. Nineteen years of civil war follow — a time, said the chronicler, when 'Christ and his saints slept'.
Twenty-one-year-old Henry of Anjou inherits England. With Normandy from his mother, Anjou from his father, and Aquitaine through his marriage to Eleanor, he rules a vast Angevin Empire stretching from Northumberland to the Pyrenees.
On 29 December four knights of the king's household ride to Canterbury and cut down Archbishop Thomas Becket at the altar of his own cathedral. The act of the king's rash words — 'Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?' — shocks Christendom.
Henry II's son Richard I succeeds him and within months takes the cross, joining Philip Augustus of France and Frederick Barbarossa to recover Jerusalem from Saladin. He spends six months of his ten-year reign in England.
On 15 June, in a meadow beside the Thames, King John seals a charter forced upon him by rebellious barons. It limits royal authority by law and declares that no free man may be imprisoned or deprived of his rights except by lawful judgement of his peers.
Having captured Henry III at the Battle of Lewes the previous year, the rebel earl Simon de Montfort summons a parliament that, for the first time, includes elected representatives of the towns alongside the barons and bishops.
After the death of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, the last native Prince of Wales, Edward I issues the Statute of Rhuddlan, annexing Wales to the English crown. He builds a ring of mighty castles — Caernarfon, Conwy, Harlech, Beaumaris — to hold the conquest.
Outside Stirling, Robert Bruce destroys the army of Edward II — perhaps twenty thousand strong, two or three times his own — in a two-day battle that secures Scottish independence for the rest of the Middle Ages.
Citing his descent from Philip the Fair through his mother Isabella, Edward III lays claim to the throne of France. Philip VI confiscates Aquitaine; Edward responds by quartering the French lilies with the English lions on his arms. The longest war in Western history has begun.
On 26 August Edward III and the Black Prince destroy a French army three times the size of their own. The English longbowmen — yeoman archers drilled in mass volley — annihilate the flower of French chivalry in a few hours of arrow storm.
In June the plague lands at Melcombe in Dorset, carried by sailors from Gascony. Within eighteen months it has killed perhaps two of every five people in England. Whole villages vanish; surviving labourers demand wages four times what they earned the year before.
Sparked by a poll tax to pay for the French war, the peasants of Kent and Essex march on London under Wat Tyler and the preacher John Ball. They sack the Savoy Palace, behead the archbishop of Canterbury, and meet the boy-king Richard II at Smithfield, where Tyler is killed.
Returning from Irish campaigns, Richard II is captured by his exiled cousin Henry Bolingbroke. Parliament accepts his abdication and Bolingbroke takes the throne as Henry IV — the first king of the House of Lancaster, and the first English king to be deposed for tyranny.
On St Crispin's Day, Henry V leads an exhausted and outnumbered English army to crushing victory over the French at Agincourt. The longbow once again wins the day; thousands of French nobles die in the mud or under English knives.
At the first Battle of St Albans, Richard Duke of York defeats and kills the leading Lancastrian nobles serving the unstable Henry VI. The thirty-year dynastic struggle between the white rose of York and the red rose of Lancaster has begun.
On 22 August Henry Tudor lands in Wales, marches into England, and defeats Richard III at Bosworth Field in Leicestershire. The last Plantagenet king is killed in a desperate cavalry charge; the crown is found in a thornbush and placed on the head of Henry VII.