ON THIS day
1381
Thomas Bampton, the king’s tax collector for Essex, is chased out of Fobbing, sparking the Peasants’ Revolt.
1431
Joan of Arc, a 19-yearold peasant girl who inspired French troops to victories against the English in the Hundred Years War, is burned at the stake after being condemned as a heretic (above).
1536
King Henry VIII of England marries his third wife Jane Seymour, only 11 days after the beheading of his second wife Anne Boleyn for treason and adultery.
1788
The speared and beaten bodies of convicts William Okey and Samuel Davis, two men sent to cut rushes, are found. Their deaths are thought to be reprisals for the theft of an indigenous canoe.
1806
Andrew Jackson, a lawyer, judge, Revolutionary War hero and aspiring politician who would later become president of the US, shoots dead lawyer Charles Dickinson in a duel over “insults” by Dickinson.
1814
The first of the Treaties of Paris is signed, ending the Napoleonic Wars.
1909
American jazz musician and bandleader Benny Goodman, who was known as the “King of Swing,” is born.
1911
The first Indy 500 is held at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
1922
The Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC is dedicated in a ceremony attended by Lincoln’s son Robert Todd Lincoln.
1942
The RAAF takes part in the first 1000bomber raid, launched by the RAF. Their target is Cologne in Germany.
1959
The experimental hovercraft makes its first trip at Cowes on the Isle of Wight. Nearly two months later a hovercraft crosses the English Channel.
2002
A solemn, wordless ceremony marks the end of the clean-up at Ground Zero in New York eight months after the September 11 attacks.