1214Philip Augustus wins the Battle of Bouvines
By 1214 Philip II of France, known as Philip Augustus, had taken Normandy, Anjou and most of the other French lands of the English kings. King John of England, determined to win them back, built an alliance with his nephew the Holy Roman Emperor Otto IV and two powerful vassals of the French king, Ferrand, Count of Flanders, and Renaud, Count of Boulogne. John would attack from the west while the allies marched on Paris from the north, but his own campaign collapsed at La Roche-aux-Moines early in July.
On Sunday 27 July 1214 Philip caught the northern army on the plain near the village of Bouvines, between Lille and Tournai. In a hard-fought battle the king was pulled from his horse and nearly killed, but the French knights broke the allies; Otto fled the field and Ferrand and Renaud were taken prisoner. Bouvines confirmed Philip’s conquests and made the French crown the strongest power in France. Otto lost his throne to Frederick II, and John came home weakened and broke, which led within a year to Magna Carta.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Battle of Bouvines ↗
1794The Convention turns on Robespierre
By the summer of 1794 the Reign of Terror had reached its height. Under a law passed in June, the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris could send suspects to the guillotine with hardly a hearing, and in June and July well over a thousand people were executed in the capital. Maximilien Robespierre, the best-known member of the Committee of Public Safety, spoke of purifying the Republic, and many deputies of the National Convention feared that they would be next.
On 26 July he gave a long, threatening speech about unnamed traitors but refused to name them. The next day, 27 July 1794, or 9 Thermidor in the revolutionary calendar, the deputies shouted him down and voted to arrest him, his brother Augustin, Saint-Just and Couthon. Freed by the Paris Commune, they gathered at the Hôtel de Ville, but troops loyal to the Convention stormed it that night. Robespierre and 21 others were guillotined on 28 July, and the Terror soon came to an end.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Thermidorian Reaction ↗
1880An Afghan army routs the British at Maiwand
In 1878 Britain invaded Afghanistan for the second time, to force the emir to shut out Russian influence. By 1880 British troops held Kabul and Kandahar, but the country was far from subdued. Ayub Khan, a son of the former emir Sher Ali Khan and governor of Herat, raised an army and marched on Kandahar, and a British and Indian brigade under Brigadier-General George Burrows was sent out to stop him.
On 27 July 1880 the two forces met near the village of Maiwand, west of Kandahar. Burrows’ brigade of about 2,500 men was heavily outnumbered, and after hours of artillery fire the Afghan infantry and horsemen broke through; nearly 1,000 British and Indian soldiers were killed, many of the 66th Regiment of Foot in a last stand in a walled garden. Afghan tradition tells of a young woman, Malalai, who rallied the fighters. The survivors were besieged in Kandahar until General Roberts’ famous march from Kabul relieved the city in September.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: National Army Museum: Second Afghan War ↗
1953An armistice ends the fighting in Korea
The Korean War began in June 1950, when North Korea invaded the South. United Nations forces led by the United States drove the North Koreans back almost to the Chinese border, and China then sent in hundreds of thousands of troops. By mid-1951 the front had settled close to the 38th parallel, where the war had started, and talks opened. They dragged on for two years, stuck above all on whether prisoners who did not want to go home should be forced to return.
At 10 a.m. on 27 July 1953, in a hall built for the purpose at Panmunjom, the American general William Harrison and the North Korean general Nam Il signed the armistice after 158 meetings, and the guns fell silent at 10 p.m. It set up a demilitarised zone four kilometres wide across the peninsula. South Korea’s president, Syngman Rhee, refused to sign, and no peace treaty has ever followed. The war cost millions of lives, and North Korea marks the day as its Victory Day.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: US National Archives: Armistice Agreement for the Restoration of the South Korean State (1953) ↗
1694The Bank of England receives its charter
In the 1690s William III was at war with Louis XIV’s France and running out of money. A Scottish merchant, William Paterson, proposed that a group of investors should lend the government a large sum in return for the right to form a company that would act as the government’s banker and issue its own notes. Parliament agreed, and in June 1694 subscribers pledged £1.2 million in a matter of days.
On 27 July 1694 the charter creating ‘The Governor and Company of the Bank of England’ was sealed, and the Bank opened for business a few days later in rented rooms in Mercers’ Hall, Cheapside. It moved to Threadneedle Street in 1734 and slowly grew into the lender of last resort for the whole banking system. It was nationalised in 1946 and given control of interest rates in 1997, and it is one of the oldest central banks in the world.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Bank of England: Why was the Bank of England founded? ↗
