English Historical Periods

It is not possible to read more than a few pages of a guidebook to the Cotswolds without coming across terms like "early Saxon", "Regency", "Tudor" and so on.

Those of us who live in England have a vague idea that "Tudor" means Henry the Eighth gorging himself on stuffed game birds, to the sound of lutes and crumhorns, and exercising his kingly habit of executing the wives he didn't like. That is about as far as it goes, and for foreign visitors the jargon is even more impenetrable.

This list is intended as a guide to terms you will find in most guides, including this one.

Neolithic: from about 4000BC to 2000BC. This was followed by the Bronze Age, which lasted until the Celts arrived and invented whisky, at which point everyone else decided to invent iron weapons.
Iron Age: from about 500 BC until the Roman conquest in 52 BC. The Iron Age in Britain is generally synonymous with the Celts.
Roman: from the invasion and conquest of Claudius in 43 A.D. to the final breakdown at the beginning of the 5th. century A.D.
Saxon: Roman administration of Britain ended effectively in 410, and following that Anglo-Saxon invaders spread in from the East, pushing the native Britons into the West. Despite significant Danish incursions, the country was broadly Saxon until the Norman Conquest in 1066. The Norman invasion was a valiant and completely unsuccessful attempt to make the English speak French, an inability which continues to this day.
Norman: subsequent to the Norman conquest in 1066, and continuing through the 12th. century (whereupon the Normans abandoned French and began to speak English themselves). This was a Good Thing.
Medieval: a term of infinite flexibility which can be used to cover the entire 1000 year period from the departure of the Roman legions to the Renaissance. It is more commonly used to cover the period from the 11th.-15th. centuries inclusive, from the First Crusade to the fall of Byzantium in 1453 and the beginnings of the Italian Renaissance.
Tudor: from the accession of Henry VII in 1485 to the death of Elizabeth I in 1603.
Elizabethan: the reign of Elizabeth I from 1558 to 1603.
Georgian: covers almost all of the 18th. C from the accession of George I in 1714 to the death of George IV in 1830. The later part of this period when George III went completely bonkers is referred to as the Regency (1811-1820).
Victorian: the reign of Victoria from 1837 to 1901.

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