On 2nd May…

1230 - William de Braose was executed by Prince Llywelyn the Great of Wales for committing adultery with Llywelyn’s wife, Joan, Lady of Wales. Just over three hundred years later adultery would lead to the execution of a Queen, Anne Boleyn second wife of Henry VIII.

1933 - The first modern sighting of the Loch Ness Monster was reported in a Scottish newspaper, the Inverness Courier. There have been sightings of a beast in the Loch dating back to the 7th century.

On 3rd May…

On 4th May…

1535 - Five monks were hanged, drawn and quartered by Henry VIII for refusing to accept him as head of the Church of England.

On 5th May…

1821 - Napoleon Bonaparte died in exile on the island of Saint Helena in the southern Atlantic. He was a former French ruler, who was crowned Emperor of France in 1804 and controlled an empire that stretched across most of Europe. He fought Britain’s Admiral Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar and the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo, losing both battles.

On 6th May…

1954 - Roger Bannister broke the ‘four-minute mile’ by running the distance in 3 minutes 59.4 seconds. Until then it had been thought to be physically impossible to run a mile in under four minutes. The current world record for this distance is 3 minutes 43.13 seconds held by Hicham El Guerrouj of Morocco.

1994 - The Channel Tunnel was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II and the French president Francois Mitterrand. Work started on the tunnel under the English Channel between England and France six years earlier in 1988. It is nearly 38km long and cost £9 billion to build. Did you know that there were attempts to build a tunnel to France in the 1880s, a century before the Channel Tunnel was built?

On 7th May…

1915 - During World War I the British passenger ship Lusitania was sunk by a German U-boat (submarine) off the west coast of Ireland. Nearly 1,200 people were drowned in the attack. The political after-effects of this event drew the U.S.A into the war.

 1945 - World War II was brought to an end in Europe when Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Allied Powers following Hitler’s suicide in Berlin.

1999 - The first Scottish Parliament for 300 years was elected, and power was transferred from Westminster in the July.

On 8th May…

1945 - VE Day, Victory in Europe is declared after Germany formally surrendered to the UK, France, the Soviet Union, and the USA. This saw the end of fighting in Europe, but the war still continued against Japan across South-East Asia and the Pacific.