Canute or Cnut the Great was born circa 985- 995, the son of King Sweyn Forkbeard of Denmark, the identity of his mother is uncertain, although it is likely that she was a Slavic princess, daughter of ...

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 ...

Halfdan Ragnarsson was the son of the legendary Viking leader, Ragnar Lodbrok and Aslaug Sigurdsdottir and the brother of 'Ivarr inn beinlausi' or Ivar the Boneless. He was one of the leaders of the ...

Ivar Ragnarsson or Ivar the Boneless (inn beinlausi) as he was curiously referred to, was a Viking warlord and a man of exceptional cruelty and ferocity, he was the son of Ragnar Lodbrok and Aslaug ...

The legendary Hereward the Wake, the guerrilla leader who headed Anglo- Saxon resistance to William the Conqueror for five years has been called one of history's "greatest Englishmen". The earliest ...

On the death of Queen Victoria in 1901 the royal house took the Germanic surname of her consort Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. King Edward VII, who reigned until 1910, was to become the only ...

Arguably one of the most effective Kings ever to wear the English crown and the first of the great Plantagenet dynasty, the future Henry II was born at Le Mans, Anjou on 5th March, 1133. He was the ...

The Picts were descendants of the Iron Age people of northern Scotland, believed to have originated in Iberia as hunter-gatherers, they moved through lower Britain and entered Scotland around 7000BC.

Cinaeth, known to history as Kenneth MacAlpin or Kenneth the Hardy, was born around 810 on the Island of Iona. He was the son of the Scots chieftain Alpin, who had led his countrymen in the struggle ...

The Tower of London, that formidable symbol of England's national heritage, served as a royal residence as well as a prison in the medieval period. The monarch traditionally spent the night at the ...

Hywel Dda 'the Good' is one of the outstanding figures in early Welsh history. Hywel was born in around 880, the son of King Cadell of Seisyllwg. Cadell had been appointed as King of Seisyllwg by his ...

Strathclyde or Ystrad Clud (beautiful Estuary) was a kingdom of the Britons, or brythonic celts in the Hen Ogledd, in what is now Northern England and southern Scotland, through the post-Roman and ...