Leeds Yorkshire United Kingdom

Edwin of Northumbria invades and annexes the minor British kingdom of Elmet in 616 (or 626).

Œthelwald in 655 assists Penda during his invasion of Northumbria.

However, when the armies of Oswiu and Penda meet at Cock Beck, near what later will be Leeds, on November 15 at the Battle of the Winwaed, Œthelwald withdraws his forces, as does Cadafael Cadomedd of Gwynedd.

Penda is defeated and killed, perhaps in part because of this desertion, and afterward Œthelwald seems to have lost Deira to Alchfrith, who is installed there by the victorious Oswiu.

Œthelwald's fate is unknown, as nothing is formally recorded of him after the battle.

Local tradition, however, held that he became a hermit in Kirkdale, North Yorkshire.

The battle has a substantial effect on the relative positions of Northumbria and Mercia.

Mercia's position of dominance, established after the battle of Maserfield, is destroyed, and Northumbrian dominance is restored; …

Bernard of Clairvaux has proved himself an effective spokesman for the Cistercian reform movement throughout Europe: by 1151 over three hundred monasteries stand, with more than eleven thousand Cistercian monks and nuns.

Construction begins on the Cistercian’s Kirkstall Abbey on the outskirts of Leeds, Yorkshire; it will take seventy-five years to complete.

Lady Margaret Douglas, the daughter of Archibald Douglas, 6th Earl of Angus, and Margaret Tudor (daughter of King Henry VII of England and widow of King James IV of Scotland), had in 1544 married Matthew Stewart (1516–71), 4th Earl of Lennox.

Because of her nearness to the English crown, Margaret had been brought up chiefly at the English court in close association with Princess Mary (afterward Queen Mary I), who had remained her fast friend throughout life.

On Elizabeth's accession in 1558, Lady Lennox retires to Yorkshire, where her home at Temple Newsom becomes a center for Roman Catholic intrigue.

She is determined to secure the succession to both thrones for her family.

Franklin makes short journeys through different parts of England in 1771, staying with the controversial British clergyman Joseph Priestley at Leeds; ...

...Joseph Priestley, working independently around the same time Scheele is investigating air, recognize those of its components now known to be oxygen and nitrogen.

Priestley, who independently discovers fire air in 1774 by the thermal decomposition of mercury dioxide, publishes his findings in the same year, three years before Scheele publishes.

Joseph Aspdin patents Portland cement in 1824.

Aspdin (or Aspden). the eldest of the six children of Thomas Aspdin, a bricklayer living in the Hunslet district of Leeds, Yorkshire, had been baptized on Christmas Day, 1778.

He had entered his father's trade, and married Mary Fotherby at Leeds Parish Church (the Parish Church of St Peter at Leeds) on May 21, 1811.

By 1817 he had set up in business on his own in central Leeds.

He must have experimented with cement manufacture during the next few years, because on October 21, 1824, he is granted the British Patent BP 5022 entitled An Improvement in the Mode of Producing an Artificial Stone, in which he coins the term "Portland cement" by analogy with the Portland stone, an oolitic limestone that is quarried on the channel coast of England, on the Isle of Portland in Dorset.

However, his son William Aspdin will be regarded as the inventor of "modern" Portland cement due to his developments in the 1840s.

Portland cement is today the most common type of cement in general use around the world as a basic ingredient of concrete, mortar, stucco, and non-specialty grout.

Louis Le Prince films the first motion picture on October 14, 1888: Roundhay Garden Scene in Roundhay, Leeds, West Yorkshire, England, two seconds and eighteen frames in length (followed by his movie Leeds Bridge).