Add a Thousand Years...

Time is a great healer. Add 1,000 years to Dark Age catastrophes to cure some monkish dating errors. Fri 13 May 2022

Inexplicably, the medieval literati were prone to mistakes. Source

Some chronologists ¹ ² ³ ⁴ claim catastrophes in the 1500s and 1600s were accidentally re-cast as catastrophes in AD 500 and AD 600.

Perhaps monks - the late-medieval literati - mis-translated Latin dates.

We can test this claim by adding 1,000 years to earlier events and comparing them with events 1,000 years later. Starting with:

1. Concrete's 1,000-Year Holiday

A technological drop-out. Source: Shadow Rome II

2. The Double Supression of the Mystery Plays

The suppression of the mystery plays occurred twice - 1,000 years apart. In the 5th century AD:

From Stages of Evil - Occultism in Western Theater and Drama Robert Lima, 2005, p13:

As the Roman Empire waned, Christianity became more powerful. In the process, it confronted the lewd drama and barbaric spectacles that passed for public entertainment. Soon the excesses became intolerable, and, when the church came into its own on the collapse of Rome, it banned all public representations and ordered the theaters to be closed.

And in the middle ages 1,000 years later.

From Stages of Evil - Occultism in Western Theater and Drama Robert Lima, 2005, p14:

there were other liturgical observances that permitted greater participation by the laity, often leading to abuses that would prove intolerable. When too many secular elements crept into the liturgical observances, the church excised them, retaining only the sacred.

3. Brittany's Double Destructions

From Brittany in the 6th century – abandoned, wet, cold and covered in forests:

Verdon [in Provence]... region seems to have been virtually abandoned. This French region seems to have suffered the most. However, similar patterns can be detected all over France (and elsewhere). Only the region around Tours presented a demographic growth pattern after AD 400-500, probably reflecting its role as a religious centre.

The new results from Bretagne corroborate these findings.

Lost Cities of Brittany, France. Anti-clockwise from top right: Gardayne, Nasado, Lexobia, Kerfeunteun, Tolente, Occismor, Ker-Is, Escoublac, Herbauges. Source

Add 1,000 years to "the 6th century" and the depopulation "detected all over France (and elsewhere)" correlates with evidence that England and Germany were reformatted in the 1600s.
Also from Brittany in the 6th century – abandoned, wet, cold and covered in forests:

the internecine wars between the Franks, the Visigoths, The Burgundians and the Ostrogoths the rapid climate deterioration after the volcanic disasters in AD 536, 540 and later, and the devastation caused by the Justinian Plague, the region seems to have been virtually abandoned.

Add 1,000 years to 'AD 536' and 'AD 540':
- 536 -> 1536
- 540 -> 1540
and the events correlate with the two years most associated with England's Dissolution of the Monasteries (separation from Catholic rule in Roman) and the coming of the 16th-19th century Little Ice Age.

536 looks so much like 1536. Source: The ancient Roman city of Viminacium

4. King Arthur's Transformation to Forgotten Prince

Add 1,000 years to 'mythical' King Arthur:
- Crowned approx 490 -> 1490
- Killed 539 -> 1539
1493 Nuremburg Chronicles depiction of Arthur as king. Source

Add 1,000 years to 'mythical' Arthur's fifth/sixth century and you land on 'heir-apparent' Prince Arthur (1486 - 1502). Arthur, the eldest son of Henry VII.

Theoretically, around 1500, Arthur, Prince of Wales, wasn't fighting Saxons and his reign wasn't shortly after the Romans left England. But if you accept:
- the theory of a more recent collapse of the Roman Empire, and
- evidence eastern England was repopulated by Angles, Flemings, Saxons, Hannoverians, and Romanesquely-named engineers and antiquarians from the 17th century onwards.

5. Flooded Eastern England

You can do the same with the flooding of eastern England.

Drowned towns of the North Sea's "nasty little jump". Source

From Britain's Sinking Lands - Exploring the Fens

Even so, the North Sea had a nasty little jump between AD 350 and 550, flooding the coasts of northern Europe with an extra 2 feet of water and sending its inhabitants - folk known as Angles and Saxons - fleeing (although “conquering” might be the better word) into ill-prepared Roman territories.

At the start of this rise, the areas we know as the Fens were a well-settled part of Roman Britain ruled from the town of Duroliponte (Cambridge) by its native people, the Christianized Romano-Celtic Iceni. Then the sea level rose, and history’s curtain went down for two centuries.

When the curtain came back up, Duroliponte and the Iceni had disappeared, and 300,000 acres of marshlands covered the northwestern flank of the pagan German kingdom of East Anglia. The modern Fens had come into existence.

Add 1,000 years to that 'nasty little jump' and you get AD 1350 and AD 1550. Now the flooding ties in with the flooding that submerged the north-west coast of Europe (drowning land, towns and cities from northern France, through The Netherlands to northern Germany). Eg:
The hungry sea. Loss of south-west Danish coast between 1362 and 1634. Source

6. Drained Eastern England

And then we have the draining of the Fens...

The mysteriously missing English fen-drainage records and the mysterious duplications between Roman fen drainage and 17th/18th century fen drainage are an investigation of their own. But the duplications can be provisionally resolved by moving the Romans 1,000 years forward and remembering the lead drainage engineer was the brilliant Dutchman "Cornelius Vermuyden".

7. New-looking earthworks

Earthworks Linear earthworks attributed to the 6th century (ie Anglo-Saxon):

Black Ditches, Cavenham, Suffolk
Devil's Dyke, Cambridgeshire
Anglo-Saxon Fleam Dyke, eastern Cambridgeshire and wikipedia dates it between 4th and 6th century
Wansdyke:

it is thought that whoever built the dyke was defending themselves against invaders from the north. But who were these invaders...?

Devil's Dyke had steep sides and young trees in 1853. Source

South of Cambridge are the six remaining Bartlow Hills:

Bartlow Hills' steep sides and saplings - fresh from an 18th century garden centre. Source

Add 1,000 years to the Bartlow Hills' alleged 1,500 year age and you'll probably be much closer to their real age.

8. Deaths of problematic 'Saints'

Add 1,000 years to the AD 286 drowning of the Saint Crispin brothers and their deaths tally with:

The 1284-1311 'Maximum Optimum' of the 800-1311 Medieval Warm Period.
The St Lucia's Day floods in Germany and Holland - including the creation of Holland's vast Zuider Zee
England's coastline-changing 'Great Storm of 1287'.

Adding 1,000 years to Saint Crispin's death-date marks the end of an era. An era that English folklore associates with youngsters being bled, skinned, and their flayed carcasses being held underwater with stone weights.