The House of Plantagenet had its origins in a cadet branch of the original counts of Anjou, the dynasty established by Fulk I of Anjou at the beginning of the tenth century. The Plantagenet dynasty ...

One of the most popular Norse heroes among the Vikings and a larger than life character, Ragnar Lodbrok was a legendary Viking commander who became a scourge of England and France. He received the ...

The House of Tudor took England's throne through victory over Richard III, the last Plantagenet king, at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. Its founder, the Lancastrian Henry VII laid down the ...

The MacAlpin dynasty, which ruled Scotland throughout the Dark Ages, united the warring races of Picts and Scots as one nation. Our section on this dynasty includes the reign of Kenneth I himself and ...

The Battle of Watling Street, one of the bloodiest battles in ancient British history, was fought in the year 60 or 61 AD between an alliance of the British tribes led by Boudica, Queen of the Iceni, ...

Cerdic was the first king of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Wessex who reigned from 519 to 534, and the ancestor of all the subsequent Anglo-Saxon Kings of England. The Anglo-Saxons were partly descended ...

Edmund I, known as 'the Elder' or the Magnificent, was born circa 921, the son of King Edward the Elder and his third wife Edgiva. As a sixteen year old, he had fought with distinction beside his ...

When Britain's last Stuart monarch, Queen Anne died in 1714, the crown of England passed by the 1701 Act of Settlement to the Stuart dynasty's German Protestant cousins, the House of Hanover, or ...

The Atrebates share their name with a tribe in pre-Roman Gaul (France). Their territory in Britain originally stretched from what is now present day West Sussex, Hampshire and Berkshire. At the time ...

The half-timbered Queen's House, which faces Tower Green, was built in around 1530, in the reign of King Henry VIII, in a very different style than the rest of the Tower of London. Henry VIII probably ...

Edgar of Wessex was born circa 942, the second son of Edmund the Elder Saint Ælfgifu of Shaftesbury. He was sixteen when he ascended the throne on the death of his elder brother, Edwy in October 959.

On the death of King Charles II on 6 February, 1685, his Catholic brother James, Duke of York succeeded to the throne as King James II. Charles II left no legitimate offspring but a large family of ...