1429In the Hundred Years' War, Joan of Arc led the French army in their capture of the city of Jargeau (France) against the English commander, William de la Pole, the 1st Duke of Suffolk. The English suffered heavy losses.

1458Magdalen College, Oxford, was founded.

1667The Dutch fleet, under Admiral de Ruyter burned Sheerness, sailed up the River Medway, raided Chatham dockyard, and then escaped with the royal barge, the Royal Charles.

1673The future King James II of England was forced to resign as Lord High Admiral because of his Catholic faith.

1683The Rye House Plot, to assassinate English king Charles II and his brother James, Duke of York, was discovered.

1819Charles Kingsley, English clergyman and author of The Water Babies, was born.

1842 The death (aged 46) of Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby School. He had much influence on public school education in England and during his time at Rugby, Arnold gradually raised it to the rank of a great public school. The schol was influential in the game of Rugby (see picture of the playing fields) and the school was the setting for the novel Tom Brown's Schooldays written by Thomas Hughes.

1889Seventy eight people were killed and 260 injured, almost a third of them children, in the Armagh rail disaster in Northern Ireland. A crowded Sunday school excursion train had to negotiate a steep incline but the steam locomotive was unable to complete the climb and the train stalled. The crew divided the train but the rear portion ran back down the gradient and collided with a following train. It was the worst rail disaster in the UK in the nineteenth century, and remains Ireland`s worst ever railway disaster.

1922George Leigh Mallory and two British climbers reached a height of 25,800 feet on Mount Everest without the aid of oxygen; the highest point ever achieved. Two years later, this same month, Mallory made another attempt with Andrew Irvine. Less than 1,000 feet from the summit, they were trapped by bad weather and were never seen alive again. (His body was eventually found on 3rd May 1999)

1980Billy Butlin, (see commemorative plaque) English holiday camp entrepreneur, died. He opened his first Butlins camp (see picture) at Skegness on 11th April 1936. It was officially opened by Amy Johnson, the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia.

1983Following Mrs. Thatcher's landslide victory in the General Election, Michael Foot resigned as Leader of the Labour party.

1986Derek Hatton, the controversial deputy leader of Liverpool Council, was expelled from the Labour Party for belonging to the left wing militant faction.

1989Members of Parliament voted to allow television cameras to broadcast proceedings in the House of Commons.

1995Two business colleagues from Sussex shared a record (at the time) National Lottery jackpot of more than £22m.

1997Law lords ruled that the former Home Secretary Michael Howard acted illegally when he raised the minimum sentence imposed on Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, the killers of two year old James Bulger in February 1993. James's mutilated body was found on a railway line two-and-a-half miles away from where he had disappeared, two days previously.

1997Queen Elizabeth II reopened the Globe Theatre in London. The new theatre was approximately 750 feet (230 m) from the site of Shakespeare's original theatre, built in 1599.

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