St.Albans Timeline

[EFM The Firm, The Voice]

Some wonderful facts about our fantastic city:

 

st.albanstimeline

 

This timeline provides a series of snap shots from St.Albans' long and distiguished history. It features some of the more remarkable incidents in the life of the city.

 

6000 BC - First visitors

The earliest evidence of human habitation in St.Albans district is from the Stone Age, around 6000 BC. These people, believed to be wandering hunters, left behind flint arrowheads and axes that would be unearthed thousands of years later. Permanent settlements were established by the first farmers in around 3500 BC.

 

54 BC - Caesar repelled

Julius Caesar leads a Roman invasion of Britain. The Catuvlluani, a tribe of Celts who control Hertfordshire, resist Caesar and fight off his army at the Wheathampstead stronghold of their chieftan, Cassicellaunus.

 

43 AD - Roman invasion

The Romans, under Aulus Plautius, invade and conquer the southern part of Britain.

 

49 - Town Established

The Romans, having conquered southern Britain, set about transforming Verlamio - a day's march from London - into a strategic Roman town. A huge fort is built to command strategic roads to Colchester and the north, and the town's name is Romanised to Verulamium.

 

60 - Rebellion

Verulamium is torched during an uprising against the Romans, led by Boudicca, queen of the Iceni tribe from East Anglia. London and Colchester are also attacked before the rebellion is crushed. Rebuilding Verulamium took more than a decade.

 

303 - Alban Martyred

Alban, a citizen of Verulamium, is beheaded by the Romans as a punishment for sheltering a priest (Christianity is still and outlawed religion). Before his execution, Alban is converted to the faith, making him Britain's first martyr.

 

426 - Barbarians take over

Verulamium comes under the control of Barbarian Angles and Saxons in the wake of the decline of the Roman occupation of Britain. The town falls into ruin.

 

793 - Offa builds monastry

Offa, King of Mercia, who controlled much of southern England, visits the shrine on the site of Albans martyrdom. He founds a monastery in honour of Alban, and a fortress called Kingsbury to protect it.

 

1066 - Norman Conquest

William the Conqueror seizes the abbey and town of St.Albans during the Norman conquest of England the followed the battle of Hastings.

 

1085 - Domesday Book

The Domesday Book, a national audit, is completed. The book records that St.Albans has, among other things, 500 inhabitants, three mills and 1,000 pigs.

 

1154 - Breakspear made pope

Nicholas Breakspear, who was born in Abbots Langley, becomes the only ever English Pope, under the name Adrian IV. As Pope he grants great privileges to St.Albans Abbey, leading to it becoming on of the most powerful abbeys in the country.

 

1250 - Earthquake strikes

St.Albans is shaken by an earthquake!

 

1335 - Gabriel struck

Gabriel, the curfew bell which strikes the hour in the clock tower, is cast in London, but it will not be until circa 1410 that the tower itself is built in french row.

 

1349 - Plague claims thousands

The Black Death, a terrible plague sweeping across England, reaches St.Albans for the first time. From the monastery alone, the abbot and 47 of the 60 monks die.

 

1381 - Peasants revolt

High taxes and low wages spark a nationwide revolt by the poor. This catches on in St.Albans, where peasants - angry at the power exerted over them by the abbey - riot and reclaim enclosed abbey land. King Richard II arrives with an army in St.Albans, and arrests the ringleaders. One of them, John Ball, is tried at the Moot Hall then hanged, drawn and quartered. Others were let off with just a hanging!

 

1399 - King imprisoned

Richard II, under a guard of 1,000 men, is imprisoned in St.Albans for several days.

 

1455 - Yorkists win battle

The first battle in the Wars of the Roses - a struggle for the throne by the rival Yorkist and Lancastrian factions - is fought in St.Albans, around St.Peter's Street. The Yorkist Soldiers win, the proceed to plunder the town. Henry VI, on the Lancatrian side, is shot in the neck with an arrow and taken prisoner.

 

1461 - Abbey looted

Victory in the Second Battle of St.Albans in the Wars of the Roses goes to the Lancastrians, in a battle distinguished by the use of primative firearms. Victorious soldiers loot the town and abbey. Their celebrations are short lived, however, as soon afterwards the Yorkists triumph in the north of England and install their king, Edward IV, on the throne. Henry VI is then executed in London.

 

1539 - Monastery demolished

Henry VIII's Reformation spells the end for the St.Albans Monastery, as it does to all monasteries all over the country. The abbot and 38 monks are pensioned off, the abbey's riches plundered, and the relics of St.Alban removed before the monastery is demolished.

 

1555 - Heretic killed

The assention of the Catholic Mary I to the throne in 1553 leads to a national backlash against Protestantism. In St.Albans a Protestant man, George Tankerfield, is burnt at the stake for heresy in Romeland, by the ruins of the abbey.

 

1577 - Elizabeth I visits

Queen Elizabeth I stays in St.Albans while on her way to Gorhambury, then home to her favourite, Sir Nicholas Bacon, who is Lord Keeper of the Great Seal.

 

1643 - Defences established

Defence works are built at the three entrances to the town in view of it being a possible base for military operations in the Cival War. The Parliamentary army stays in St.Albans for a while. St.Albans becomes a training depot for recruits for Oliver Cromwell's parliamentarian New Model Army in 1645.

 

1649 - Witches executed

F Palmer and Elizabeth Knott are both tried and executed for witchcraft.

 

1765 - Ver bridged

A bridge over the river Ver is built at St.Micael's, by the St.Albans Turnpike Trust. It remains the earliest surviving bridge in Hertfordshire.

 

1830 - Town Hall built

A new imposing building appears in the Market Place, to be used jointly as a town hall and court house. This replaces the old town hall, which was at the corner of Upper Dagnall Street and Market Place.

 

1841 - Victoria visits

Queen Victoria and her consort, Prince Albert, pay St.Albans a visit. The royal party is greeted outside the Verulam Arms Hotel and proceeds down Chequer Street, where a huge triumphal arch is erected. Thousands line the streets.

 

1847 - Theatre unearthed

Archaeological excavations near Gorhambury Drive find the only Roman theatre known to exist in England.

 

1857 - Corn Exchange built

The Corn Exchange is built in Market Place to provide a venue for farmers to sell their produce at market, without rain spoiling sacks of grain.

 

1858 - Railway arrives

After much local campaining, the London and North Western Railway Company extends it's branch line from Watford to St.Albans. The arrival of the first train in St.Albans is the cause of much public rejoicing.

 

1866 - Prison built

St.Albans prison is built, near City railway station, at a cost of £20,000, to hold 112 prisoners. Several executions take place there before it is closed as a prison in 1915. The building is demolished in 1931.

 

1894 - Park opened

Sir John Blundell Maple, a furniture store magnate living in Childwickbury, gives Clarence Park to the people of St.Albans in an act of public generosity. The 24-acre ground is used for sporting and social events, and is now home to St.Albans City FC.

 

1895 - Ryder starts business

Samuel Ryder chooses St.Albans as a base for his business selling penny- packets of flower seeds. He becomes Mayor of St.Albans in 1905, and erected his famous offices and seed hall on Hollywell Hill in 1911.

 

1921 - Memorial erected

The War Memorial - commemorating 650 citizens of St.Albans who fell in the First World War - is erected in St.Peter's Street.

 

1930 - Verulamium exposed

A major archaeological excavation of Verulamium, led by mortimer wheeler, begins. The purchase of Verulamium Park by the city council in 1929 had allowed the excavation work to go ahead. The project, which attracted huge National interest, will go on until 1934.

 

1971 - Cattle market ends

The centuries-old tradition of holding a cattle market in St.Albans city cetre every week ceases. The cattle maket, once a social and economic fixture, was formerly held in front of the old town hall but moved to Drovers Way - now the site of the muti-storey car parks - in 1926.

 

1980 - Archbishop appointed

The right Reverand Robert Runcie, Bishop of St.Albans, becomes Archbishop of Canterbury. He is the first man from St.Albans ever to suceed to the post, which he hold until 1991.

 

1991 - Terrorists attack

Two IRA bombers blow themselves up while trying to place a device in the Alban Arena, where the British Army band is playing a concert.

 

1999 - City celebrates

St.Albans sees in the new Millennium with the bigest fireworks display ever held in the city - a spectacular event by Verulamium Lake, in view of St.Albans Abbey - on Millennium Eve. As a momento, all 12,000 primary schoolchildren in the district are given replicas of a coin used by Celtic tribesmen living in St.Albans at the dawn of the First Millennium.

 

 

[Canary Saint]

And not forgetting........

 

1908 - The birth of St Albans City FC

During the spring of 1908, after four years without a club bearing the name of the city of St. Albans, the old Roman city, through the sheer determination and vision of one individual - George Thomas Wagstaffe Simmons - fully embraced the sporting phenomenon which had spread across the country during the previous 40 years.

 

 

[YB941 5thD EFM ~soul~]

2000-01 - EFM formed.

 

 

[GHA EFM]

2006 (?) - SACFC move out of St. Albans and into Park Street?

[JKiF]

1976 Feb 19 & March 25

 

Sex Pistols @St Albans Hertfordshire Art College

 

 

 

[gertcha EFM]

7th August 1964, Sniffer Thorns born in St.Albans.