1066: William the Conqueror landed in England.

1399: The first British monarch to abdicate, Richard II, was replaced by Bolingbroke to whom he had surrendered without a fight. Bolingbroke ascended as Henry IV.

1758: Horatio Nelson, hero of Trafalgar and Britain's greatest sailor, was born at Burnham Thorpe, Norfolk.

1829: Britain's first official police force was mobilised and its men nicknamed "Bobbies" or "Peelers'' after Sir Robert Peel, the Home Secretary who founded it.

1930: George Bernard Shaw turned down a peerage.

1938: The Munich Pact, an agreement between England, France, Germany and Italy, was signed, under which the Sudetenland was surrendered to Nazi Germany.

1941: A Nazi death squad murdered 30,000 Russian Jews in Kiev.

1952: British and world water-speed record holder John Cobb was killed on Loch Ness when his vessel Crusader disintegrated after hitting waves at 240mph.

1983: A Chorus Line broke the record as the longest-running Broadway show with its 3,389th performance since July 25, 1975.

LAST YEAR: A strict Kurdish Muslim who cut his daughter's throat as she was "too Westernised" was given a life sentence at the Old Bailey for her murder.