Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales was written in the fourteenth century in England. It is famous for helping popularize the use of the vernacular (local) language in writing and helped encouraged the spread of humanism during the English Renaissance.

Following the death of the last Tudor ruler, Queen Elizabeth I, in 1603, the English crown was left without any direct heir. So the Scottish monarch James I, Elizabeth’s cousin, ascended to the throne. In doing so, he began the process of uniting the Scottish and English kingdoms into the Kingdom of Great Britain. Although James I could not himself unify the two kingdoms (he ruled over them both independently), they would be unified a century later during the reign of Queen Anne, the last Stuart monarch.