english_monarchs: English Monarchs
In richierocks/learningr: Data and Functions to Accompany the Book "Learning R"

Names, dates and houses of English kings and queens from post-Roman rule (the fifth century) until England invaded Ireland in the Early 13th century.

A data frame with the following columns.

name: Name of monarch(s).
house: Royal house of monarch(s).
start.of.reign: Year they rose to power.
end.of.reign: Year they left power.
domain: Region of England ruled over.

This dataset is a bit messy and ambiguous in places, because history is like that. In fact, the messy parts of the dataset are in general a good indicator that soemthing interesting was happening at the time. (See, for example, missing or multiple rulers, starts and ends of reigns in the same year, and rulers that appear several times with different territories.) Evan defining a monarch of England is tricky. Most of the monarchs in this dataset were around before England existed (it consisted of seven territories called the heptarchy). The data stops before John I (the bad guy from the Robin Hood stories) because he proclaimed himself King of Ireland, although some people consider monarchs up to Anne, five hundred years later, to be English Monarchs even though they ruled over Ireland, Wales and Scotland to varying degrees.

The heptarchy consisted of East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Mercia, Northumbria, Sussex and Wessex. Northubria was originally divided into Deria and Bernicia. There are also periods of Norse and Danish rule.

The dataset was compiled from Wikipedia and thus is not guaranteed to be error free. Please double check the data if you want to use it for something serious.

Richard Cotton richierocks@gmail.com compiled the dataset from various Wikipedia pages. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kings_of_england http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kings_of_East_Anglia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kings_of_Essex http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kings_of_Kent http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kings_of_Mercia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kings_of_Northumbria http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kings_of_Sussex http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kings_of_Wessex