Calendars – Techniques of Digital Heraldry

Historical Timing of East Kingdom Coronation

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:

Anno Societatis Conversions

With the arrival of spring, we are once again approaching the start of a new SCA year, or Anno Societatis (The Society calendar matches the Gregorian calendar’s months and days, but counts its years from the date of the first event of what became the SCA: the so-called First Tournament, which took place on May 1, 1966 in a backyard in Berkley, California.)

While conversions between the two calendars aren’t terribly confusing, it does always take me a moment or two to make sure I’m correctly adjusting for the differing start of the year, and I though it might be useful to have a visual reference, so I put together a pair of charts: one for moving from common dates to A.S. years, and the other for the reverse.

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.

Charting the East’s Crown Cycle

For those of us steeped in the culture of our local kingdom, the annual rhythm of coronations and crown tournaments is part of the familiar cycle of the year, but I remember being somewhat bewildered by it as a newcomer.

In hopes of making the procession of fixed dates slightly more accessible, I put together a simple chart showing how the calendar year aligns with the summer and winter reigns and the kingdom events that govern their passage here in the East.