Chapter 3: History — Set 2

Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales in the late 1300s, telling the stories of a group of pilgrims travelling together to Canterbury.

At Bosworth Field in 1485, the Lancastrian Henry Tudor defeated Richard III of York and became Henry VII, beginning the Tudor dynasty.

English wool was prized across Europe in the Middle Ages and the wool trade brought great wealth to England's landowners and merchants.

Henry VIII married six times; two of his wives, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, were executed, and his marriages drove England's break with Rome.

Mary was sent to France as a small child and raised at the French court; she returned to Scotland as a young widow and became the focus of struggles between Catholic and Protestant groups.

Drake's voyage of 1577 to 1580 made him the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe, and English seafarers increasingly challenged Spanish power at sea.

Guy Fawkes and his fellow plotters hid barrels of gunpowder beneath Parliament, intending to kill James I at the state opening; the plot was discovered in time.

After his defeat in the Civil War, Charles I was tried and executed in 1649, and England became a republic, the Commonwealth.

Charles II was restored in 1660, ending the Commonwealth period, though Parliament's power was never again as weak as before the Civil War.

Parliament invited William of Orange and Mary, James's Protestant daughter, to take the throne, and the Bill of Rights of 1689 confirmed limits on royal power.

Adam Smith's writing in the 1700s about how markets work laid the foundations of modern economics and influenced Britain's move towards freer trade.

Watt's improved steam engine, developed in Scotland in the late 1700s, gave factories, mines and transport a far more efficient source of power.

Canals linked industrial towns to ports and coalfields, letting heavy raw materials and finished goods be carried cheaply before the railways took over.

George and Robert Stephenson, father and son, pioneered the development of the railway locomotive, and their engine Rocket won the Rainhill Trials of 1829. The celebrated improvements to the steam engine were the work of James Watt, and the Crystal Palace was designed by Joseph Paxton.

Victoria became queen in 1837 aged just 18 and reigned until 1901, longer than any British monarch before Elizabeth II.

The Boers were descendants of Dutch settlers in southern Africa, and the Boer War sharpened debates about the future and cost of the British Empire.

When the potato harvest failed repeatedly, around a million people died and many more emigrated, chiefly to the United States, Britain and Australia.

The 1832 Act swept away constituencies controlled by one family or with almost no voters, and gave the vote to more men in the growing industrial towns.

The armistice took effect at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 11 am on 11 November 1918, with victory for Britain and its allies.

RAF fighter pilots held off the Luftwaffe through the summer of 1940, forcing Hitler to abandon his planned invasion of Britain.

A flotilla of naval ships and hundreds of civilian volunteers in small boats rescued over 300,000 men, giving rise to the phrase 'the Dunkirk spirit'.

The Beveridge Report of 1942 led to the modern welfare state with social security for all, and the National Health Service was established in 1948, providing care free at the point of use. The Bank of England was founded much earlier, in 1694, and the Open University did not open until 1969.

Attlee's post-war government introduced the NHS and a national system of benefits designed to protect people 'from the cradle to the grave'.

The Equal Franchise Act of 1928 finally put women on an equal voting footing with men at 21, a decade after some women first won the vote in 1918.