Hello. I'm Gill at engVid, and today we have a lesson on some historical periods. So, people
have asked for... Sort of to clarify what do we mean by "Victorian", what do we mean
by "Elizabethan", those sorts of terms in history, and when was that? What century was that in?
So, this lesson is to cover the main periods in history, both for the history itself,
maybe for some examples of the literature of the time, maybe a bit about what architecture was
built in a certain period, that kind of thing, and different names, the names of kings and queens,
and sometimes how that period in history was labelled with a particular name. So, it's not
meant to be a completely detailed, comprehensive coverage of English history or British history
over the last few hundred years, so I haven't mentioned every single king. I'd probably...
No, all queen. There were some queens as well that I haven't mentioned. So, there were kings
and queens who were not on the board. It's just to give you a basic outline and an overview
of the last few hundred years and some of the labels given to the different periods in history.
So, if you think, "Oh, oh, she hasn't mentioned Queen Anne, or she hasn't mentioned James II,
or William and Mary", it's just because partly there isn't room on the board for absolutely
everything, and also it would get very complicated and detailed if I... If I covered all of them.
So, this is just a basic outline. Okay. So, let's have a look, then. So, we're going from
the medieval period, the Middle Ages or medieval. So, that's around the time of, well, Chaucer,
and earlier than Chaucer as well. It's quite a number of centuries, Chaucer being one of the
well-known writers in English literature. So, we're going from medieval, and then you may
recognize some of these names of the periods. Tudor, Stuart, then we have the Commonwealth,
Restoration, Hanoverian or Georgian, Victorian, Edwardian, and then the present day Elizabethan,
well, the Second Elizabethan Age, because we have Elizabeth II as the queen. There was an earlier
Queen Elizabeth I, and that was also called the Elizabethan period, but that was part of the
Tudor period, so we'll come to that. Okay, so that's the overview. Those are the names,
the basic names of the different periods in history. Some of them based on the names of the
kings or queens, and some for different reasons, different types of labelling. Okay. So, just for
the medieval period, I can't go into all the detail again of that because it covers a few
hundred years, but Gothic architecture, you would see from this period, churches and cathedrals
around this time, that style with the big, you know, sharp pointed spire and the sort of...
That sort of shape arch, not a really rounded arch, but a sort of narrow arch for windows
and doorways and so on. And just to mention just one writer who's very important in English
literature, Chaucer, who wrote the Canterbury Tales, a set of comic tales, who lived from
somewhere in the 1340s. I don't think we know exactly what year he was born, but he died in
1400. And he wrote in a much earlier style of English, of course, which is called Middle
English, not Modern English, but Middle English to go with the Middle Ages or the medieval
period. So, Middle English Chaucer was writing in. So, it looks very... A lot of French words
in it. It's not always easy to understand. It's actually been translated into Modern
English so that more people can understand it. Okay.
So, moving on, there were some other kings in between called the Plantagenets, but again,
I can't cover everybody, unfortunately. So, I've moved on to the Tudors, and Henry VII
was the first Tudor king who came to the throne in 1485, so that's 15th century. So, you always
add another 14-something, means 15th century, you always add one to the year for that. So,
there was Henry VII and Henry VIII, Henry VIII being the king who had six wives, one
after another, not all at the same time. Okay. So, very famous. And Henry VIII, that was
when this country had been a Catholic country, but partway through Henry VIII's reign, it
became a Protestant country for the first time. Okay.
And then his son, Edward VI, reigned not very long because he died as quite a young man.
So, then his sister, Mary, came onto the throne, and she took the country back into being Catholic
again. This all caused a huge amount of trouble, and there were executions and all sorts of
terrible things going on because of these changes between Protestant and Catholic, even
though both are supposed to be Christian, but it meant an awful lot of violence and
execution and so on. So, Catholic again under Mary. And then Mary's sister, half-sister
Elizabeth came to the throne, and it... The country went back to Protestant again. Okay.
And Elizabeth I, who reigned until 1603, so we've got the Tudor period, 1485 to 1603,
and so her period was called the Elizabethan Age, named after her. And that's when Shakespeare,
the plays and the poems became well-known, Shakespeare, who continued on into the next
period, so he became a popular playwright under Elizabeth I's reign. And then Elizabeth
died, and James I came to the throne, and his... He was from a different family called
the Stuarts, so 1603 for James. And his period, it's not called Jamesian, it's called Jacobean
because Jacob and James, it's the same name, basically, so Jacobean. So, Shakespeare lived
in the Elizabethan and the Jacobean period. Okay.
And then after James, we got Charles I, but then some difficulties again. Charles I was
wanting to have too much power and the... And to get rid of the Parliament, basically,
so there was a civil war, the English Civil War took place. Again, it was partly to do
with who was sort of more interested in Catholicism rather than Protestantism, and a lot of conflict.
And then Charles was actually executed. He was blamed for the civil war and for the deaths
of many, many people, and he was put on trial and condemned to death, and he was executed.
And then there was no king at all for a time because the person who had led the civil war,
Oliver Cromwell, on the Protestant side was in charge. He'd been in the Parliament before,
so it was like the Parliament suddenly took over. There was no king at all. Charles had
tried to get rid of Parliament, and what happened was the Parliament itself became in full control
of the country with no king or queen, so Oliver Cromwell, and that's called the Commonwealth
period. But then when Oliver Cromwell died, things just sort of couldn't go on that way,
so a king was brought back, Charles II. So the Restoration, meaning the restoration of the
monarchy, restoring a king to the throne, that's why it's called Restoration. Okay, from 1660,
his reign, to 1685. And I've put "theatre" here because under the Commonwealth these people were
called Puritans. They were so very strict Protestants, and they didn't approve of the
theatre at all. There'd been some of them around in Shakespeare's time trying to close the theatres
because they thought the theatre was immoral or was a bad influence on people. So in Oliver
Cromwell's period in the Commonwealth, the theatres were closed. Even Christmas was abolished
because it was thought to be too frivolous. So it went the other way with the Restoration,
and Charles II was a very fun-loving king, to say the least. And the theatres were opened again,
and it was quite an immoral time, really. You know, a lot of freedom of behaviour. And also
a new thing that happened with the theatre was that women could perform. In Shakespeare's day,
it was illegal for women to perform on the stage in the professional theatre. For the female roles,
they had boys who had higher... Higher-pitched voices before their voices broke. So they had
boys playing the women's roles in Shakespeare's day, even. So here, for the first time, you had
actual adult women actresses performing in the theatre. So the Restoration Theatre, the period
is the Restoration, but it also gives its name to the theatre, Restoration Theatre, and the type
of plays that were being written and performed at that time. So that's quite an important thing,
there. Okay, and then things moved on. I can't mention again all the, you know, other kings
and queens in between here, but generally, if we go on to the Hanoverian or the Georgian period.
Georgian because there were four kings called George, one after another, first, second, third,
and fourth, from 1714 onwards. And Hanoverian because they actually came from Hanover in
Germany. Again, they were Protestant, and that seemed to be the best option. There was a danger,
people felt danger that a Catholic king might come to the throne again, and they didn't want
that kind of disruption going between the two, Protestant and Catholic, that had caused so much
trouble earlier. So these German people were invited over to become the monarchs. And so that
went on, that was the Georgian period with all the Georges, one, two, three, and four. Again,
followed by William, William IV as well, but I haven't added him in on the board. But then when
he died, we had a fairly straightforward period that lasted a long time. Queen Victoria, 1837
to 1901, so the Victorian period is a very sort of long, specific period. A period of a lot of
industrial development, a lot of social change, more democracy. There were three acts of parliament
that gave the vote to more people, and more people, mostly men, but it was more people getting
the vote gradually. Women didn't get the vote till the 20th century, but it was a period of
great social change and industrialization as well. Just one name here, Charles Dickens,
the famous novelist. There isn't room to put all the other many, many writers on there,
but that's just to give you an idea where Charles Dickens belongs in this picture. Okay.
So, Victoria died 1901, and her son Edward became Edward VII, so that was called the Edwardian
period. And because he was already, you know, she'd lived such a long time, he was already
getting quite old by the time he came to the throne, so 1901 to 1910 he was king. And then,
again, there are other kings following this, but I can't put them all on the board, but two big
defining periods in... In this early part of the 20th century were the two World Wars, so World
War I, 1914 to '18. And poetry, in particular, was important at this time. There were war poets,
poets who actually wrote about the war because they were possibly involved as soldiers. There
were soldiers who wrote poetry, and some of it was published and it's still studied today. So,
World War I, and then World War II that followed not that long afterwards, 1939 to '45.
And then after all that, again, there's another king, George VI, who I haven't had room to put
in here, but then his... Oh, and Edward's... Oh gosh, before him there was Edward VIII. Again,
complicated period. He abdicated for various reasons, for one particular reason. His brother,
then George VI, became king, and then when he died, his daughter, Elizabeth, became queen. So
she became queen in 1952, and at the time of making this video, she is still the queen,
but very elderly now. So... But it's been, I think, an amazing period in history,
and a very stable period. I'm getting quite emotional about it because it's the period I've
lived through, so that's the Second Elizabethan Age. So, there we are. So, that's just a very,
very limited overview of the period. So, you know, if you post comments, if you say, "Oh,
you forgot to mention this king. You didn't mention that queen." It's because there isn't
room on the board for that, but, you know, we have the internet, lots of information on there.
If you want to follow up on any of these periods, you can search with keywords to find out either
the names of kings and queens, the label of the period. You can search to find out more about
what was going on at that time. So, I hope that's been a useful lesson for you, and if you'd like
to do a quiz on this topic and test your knowledge, just go to the website, www.engvid.com, and do
the quiz. And thanks for watching, and hope to see you again soon. Bye for now.