Kingdom Crown Calendar Comparison

A few days ago, after putting together an illustration of the East Kingdom’s annual cycle of crown/coronation events, I wondered what it would look like to compare those cycles across the other realms.

I asked some other heralds about this idea, and Ollivier Le Floch took the initiative in setting up a shared spreadsheet that allowed a bunch of people to quickly jump in and collaboratively fill in that data across all all twenty kingdoms. As the patterns emerged, I resolved to try presenting them in graphical form.

Timing of Coronations and Crown Tourneys

The dates for these events are defined in the laws of each kingdom (see highlight box attached below for links), but a bit of abstraction was required to simplify them into a fixed calendar — especially as kingdoms take different approaches to scheduling, and events were variously defined as falling “on the Saturday closest to January 6,” “on the second weekend in April,” “on the Saturday before Memorial Day,” “on Columbus Day Weekend,” and a dozen other points, each of which can move around from year to year.

Accepting a certain amount of imprecision, I did my best to squeeze the data into a single-page chart, shown here:

Chart Conventions

In this chart, each reign is shown in a different color: gold for summer/spring, blue for winter/fall. (The West, always sui generis, also has a third reign each year, shown in green.)

Each cycle starts with a crown tourney and term as heirs , followed by a coronation and reign , ending at the next coronation.

A range of weekends is shown as a wide box ; fallback dates appear in dotted lines while preferred weeks are solid .

Seasonal Reigns

You can see that most kingdoms alternate summer and winter reigns, with spring coronations in March/April/May and fall coronations in September/October.

However there are a few kingdoms that don’t follow this pattern — Calontir, Outlands, An Tir, Caid, and Drachenwald split the year differently, and alternate spring and autumn reigns, with coronations at midwinter and midsummer.

Avacal, the newest kingdom, lies somewhere between these two patterns, with coronations at the end of spring and the end of the autumn.

And while Lochac does follow a summer/winter pattern, because they are in the southern hemisphere, their timing is reversed.

Reign Lengths

To compare the lengths of reigns, I extracted the timeline for each and aligned their coronation dates.

This chart reveals that the Middle kingdom and it’s descendents (Calontir, Northshield, Ealdormere) have significantly longer winter reigns than summer reigns, presumably to balance out the fact that there’s less activity in the winter months. (For example, the Middle’s summer reign is five months while the winter lasts seven months.) Curiously this pattern is echoed by Trimaris, although their weather is quite different.

It also highlights that some of the western kingdoms have much shorter terms for the heirs (between crown tourney and coronation). For example, in Calontir, Outlands, and Avacal, the heirs have three months before they’re crowned; in Lochac it’s just two months. By comparison, the Eastern-rite kingdoms hold crown tourney shortly after coronation, giving the heirs five months to learn the ropes before taking the thrones.

(Perhaps coincidentally, the late-crown kingdoms are generally also spring/fall rather than summer/winter kingdoms, although it’s not a precise alignment — Caid follows a spring/fall cycle but has four-months between crown tourney and coronation, a bit longer than Ansteorra despite its summer/winter cycle.)