A recent comment on social media led me to wonder when the East Kingdom’s spring-and-fall calendar for coronations had been established. I knew it had been developed independently of the West, which follows a completely different schedule, and a cursory glance at the list of coronation dates shows that the first few years were much more ad-hoc — when had things stabilized?
I pasted the dates into a spreadsheet and applied a few minor transformations to produce this chart, showing the chaos of the kingdom’s first five years followed by a shift in 1973:
From 1974 on, every coronation for 45 years is held in April or in October (with a few slipping into the last weekend of September). The only break in this pattern comes during 2020 and 2021, when Covid made it exceedingly difficult to hold events.
Those two Covid-era reigns really stand out on a chart of reign lengths, encompassing a span of about a year each:
With those exceptions, the post-1973 reigns hold very closely to a six-month cycle; the most common reign length is exactly 26 weeks, closely followed by years with a pair of reigns at 25 and 27 weeks.
The biggest variations emerge in stretches of years when spring coronations slip into the second half of April, giving us a cycle of 24-week summer reigns and 28-week winter reigns, but these are a minority in what is otherwise a very stable cycle.
Overall, an impressive degree of continuity!