I'll give you a shakedown of Britain.

The Vikings were in the ascendance. 1014 was right in the middle of a huge Danish effort to take Anglo-Saxon England. Aethelred the Unready (actually Aethelred Unraed, "ill-counselled", not "unready") had just expelled the Danish king Sven Forkbeard from the country and was preparing to face his son, Knut. As we all know, England was to fall to Knut and become part of the largest Empire the north Atlantic had ever seen, taking in England, Denmark, Norway and, to some extent, Sweden. Knut, unique amongst the northmen, would later have his son crowned by the Pope. There are arguments over how poor the Danish incursions made England at this time; Aethelred repeatedly used huge amounts of coinage to pay off the Vikings (the so-called Danegeld), leading to a surprising amount being found in archaeological sites back in Scandinavia. Regardless of the economic consequences of the Dane's predations, the population were certainly terrified. One need only read a bit of Wulfstan, writing around the year 1000, a year when many thought the world was coming to an end:

The sermon of the Wolf to the English, when the Danes were greatly persecuting them, which was in the year 1014 after the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ:

Beloved men, know that which is true: this world is in haste and it nears the end. And therefore things in this world go ever the longer the worse, and so it must needs be that things quickly worsen, on account of people's sinning from day to day, before the coming of Antichrist. And indeed it will then be awful and grim widely throughout the world. Understand also well that the Devil has now led this nation astray for very many years, and that little loyalty has remained among men, though they spoke well. And too many crimes reigned in the land, and there were never many of men who deliberated about the remedy as eagerly as one should, but daily they piled one evil upon another, and committed injustices and many violations of law all too widely throughout this entire land.

Well, that was England. Wales at the time had been ruled by one royal house, the house of Rhodri Mawr, or the Merfynion, for nearly 300 years. The country was actually split into several minor kingdoms, most notably, Gwynedd in the north, ruled from Aberffraw on Angelsey, and Deheubarth in the south, ruled from Dinefwr castle. Though a member of the Merfynion was ruling in the south, in 1005 one Aeddan ap Blegywryd had usurped the usual line. In 1018 he was to die in battle to Llywelyn ap Seisyll, again from outside of the Merfynion. Though Gwynedd returned to the House of Rhodri Mawr on Llywelyn's death, his son, Gruffudd, was to conquer all of Wales and become the greatest Welsh prince in history. These kings from outside of the House of Rhodri Mawr were to be the defining characteristic of the Welsh political scene in the eleventh century. 1014 was the beginning of this activity.

How about Ireland? Well, you lucked out here, because 1014 is quite possibly the most important date in Irish history. 23rd April, 1014, saw the Battle of Clontarf. Here Brian Boru, King of Munster and High King of Ireland, indeed, possibly the most powerful native Irish king in Irish history, and the forces of the Norse Kingdoms of Dublin, Orkney, Man and Irish Leinster joined in battle to decide the future political landscape of Ireland and its surrounding kingdoms. The result was an Irish victory, the norsemen were slaughtered and the power of Dublin, supreme in the Irish Sea until this point, was greatly reduced. However, this victory came at a cost, and both Brian Boru and his son were slain. Furthermore, the Norse dynasties were weakened, but not yet defeated. It would take until 1052 for the King of Leinster, Diarmait mac Máel na mBó, to capture Dublin and assert Irish overlordship over the Norse possessions in Ireland.

How about Scotland, I hear you ask? Well, as I'm sure it appears, events in Scotland, Ireland and England (but oddly not so much Wales) were all linked. 1014 in Scotland was nine years into the reign of Máel Coluim mac Cináeda (or Malcolm II in English), one of the first kings of Alba of whom we know more than a name and a few dates. He belonged to the Alpinid dynasty. Alex Woolf has tied Malcolm's rise to power with the rise of Brian Boru in Ireland. In 1005, Brian led his army into the north of Ireland, Ulster, and laid low the native dynasty, the Ulaid. The Ulaid, however, had power across the Irish Sea and it is likely no coincidence that 1005 also saw Malcolm's accession, through the power vacuum left by Brian's conquests, to the Kingdom of Alba. Later in his reign, Malcolm was to fight our old friend Knut, coming away with a tight draw. On his death, however, Alba was to fall into anarchy and Malcolm, descended from the first king to unify Alba, Cinaed mac Alpin, was to be the last of his dynasty. In 1040, Duncan I, a ruler of Moray in the north of Scotland, reunited Alba and the rivalry between that king and Mac Bethad mac Findlaích was to be immortalised in Shakespeare's Scottish Play.

So as a quick summary of what was happening; ENGLAND Anglo-Saxons on the out, Danes on the in. WALES Native Welsh dynasties on the out, new dynasties on the in. IRELAND northmen in the Isles on the out, native Irish on the in. SCOTLAND Alpinids on the out, Shakespeare on the in.