England historical timeline

England has been continuously inhabited for about 13,000 years and continuously governed for eleven centuries, and almost every stage left something a visitor can stand in: the stone circle, the Roman wall, the Saxon church, the Norman keep, the Gothic cathedral, the Georgian crescent, the mill, the pier, the tube station.

Chronology

1. 800,000 BC – 3100 BC Stone tools and footprints at Happisburgh in Norfolk are the oldest human traces in Britain; a jaw from Kents Cavern in Devon is 41,000 to 44,000 years old; the sea cuts Britain from the continent about 6500 BC; farmers arrive about 4100 BC, lay the Sweet Track across the Somerset Levels in 3807 BC and begin Stonehenge's bank and ditch about 3100 BC, raising the great sarsen circle between 2600 and 2400 BC.
2. 55 BC – AD 410 Julius Caesar lands twice; the Romans conquer in AD 43 and stay 350 years, founding London, Bath, York and Chester, building Hadrian's Wall for 73 miles from the Tyne to the Solway Firth from AD 122, and proclaiming Emperor Constantine at York in 306 before the legions leave in 410.
3. 450 – 1066 Angles, Saxons and Jutes settle and give the country its name and language; Augustine founds Canterbury Cathedral in 597 and Aidan the monastery of Lindisfarne in 634; the Vikings sack Lindisfarne in 793; Alfred's Wessex resists and Æthelstan unites England in 927; Cnut makes it part of a North Sea empire in 1016; Edward the Confessor builds Westminster Abbey, consecrated in 1065.
4. 1066 William of Normandy lands in Sussex on 28 September, kills King Harold on 14 October and is crowned in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day; the Tower of London's White Tower rises from 1078, the Domesday Book counts the kingdom in 1086, and by 1087 only about 8 per cent of the land is still in English hands.
5. 1215 King John seals Magna Carta at Runnymede on 15 June; the universities of Oxford (1096) and Cambridge (1209) are founded; Henry III rebuilds Westminster Abbey from 1245 and holds the first assemblies of representatives in its chapter house in 1257; Edward I conquers Wales in 1284; the Black Death of 1348 kills up to half the population; the Wars of the Roses end at Bosworth in 1485.
6. 1534 Henry VIII makes himself head of the Church of England, dissolves the monasteries and annexes Wales; Elizabeth I's navy defeats the Armada in 1588; Shakespeare, born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, writes for the London stage; the Civil War of 1642–51 ends with Charles I's execution in 1649, the Restoration follows in 1660, the Great Fire burns London in 1666 and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and Bill of Rights of 1689 settle that Parliament rules with the king.
7. 1707 England and Scotland unite as Great Britain on 1 May; Abraham Darby smelts iron with coke at Coalbrookdale (1709), the Bridgewater Canal opens (1761), Hargreaves builds the spinning jenny (1764), Arkwright's mill turns at Cromford (1771) and the Iron Bridge spans the River Severn (1779): the Industrial Revolution begins in England and Britain rules the largest empire in history.
8. 1825 The Stockton and Darlington Railway carries the first steam passengers, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway the first intercity trains in 1830; the Peterloo massacre of 1819 and the Reform Acts of 1832–84 widen the vote; Queen Victoria reigns from 1837 to 1901 over the largest city in the world, the first underground railway (1863), the Football Association (1863) and a country three-quarters urban by 1901.
9. 1940 The Blitz bombs London for 56 of 57 nights from 7 September and kills more than 40,000 civilians before May 1941; the National Health Service opens on 5 July 1948; the Windrush generation arrives from the Caribbean; the Great Smog kills about 12,000 in December 1952 and the North Sea flood 307 in England in January 1953; the Beeching cuts halve the railway in the 1960s; the Great Storm of 15–16 October 1987 fells 15 million trees.
10. 1994 The Channel Tunnel joins England to France; the Premier League (1992) becomes the world's most-watched league; the UK votes to leave the European Union on 23 June 2016 and does so on 31 January 2020; 40.3 °C is recorded at Coningsby on 19 July 2022; the London Marathon sees the first sub-two-hour marathon in 2026.

What survived, and how

The stones survived because they were too heavy to move and, from 1882, protected by law; the cathedrals because the Reformation kept them as churches; the castles because the monarchy never fell for long; the Georgian towns because they were too poor to rebuild until they were too loved to; the mills and docks because the Industrial Revolution's ruins became its museums. What did not survive was the industry itself, half the railway, and most of the woods -- and the pub is going the same way at two a day.