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Teaching history should instil the value of curiosity over the precision of dating. The BC/AD model is so wonderfully imprecise it offers a rich seam for the historically curious to mine.

3rd September 1189 is a date writ large in the memory of practically no one. It is, however, the official beginning of "time immemorial".

"Time immemorial" is a phrase redolent of infinite antiquity, its alliterative form poetically evoking unharnessed time sweeping back to the ancient of days. So the precision of an exact date comes as something of a surprise.

Actually, on mature consideration, there is little of precision about 3rd September 1189. Like many antique dates it is open to considerable recalibration in time and space.

The year of the Christian Calendar is notably subject to variation, largely due to the necessity of calculating Easter as a moveable feast. Although the methodology for the calculation of Easter was formalised in A.D. 325 at the Council of Nicaea, in A.D. 525 the Scythian monk Dionysius Exiguus was working out a table for the date of Easter, the Nicaean calculations being only up to A.D. 531. Having no number for zero he calculated Easter from the year of the birth of Christ as year 1 (hence, among other arguments, the debate on the exact year for the timing of celebrations at the last Millennium). The Synod of Whitby, just over a century after the Dionysian calculations, adopted this methodology using A.D.1 as the base for calculating Easter.

At this point there is unity in time but not space because while most of Europe adopted the era adumbrated at the Synod of Whitby. Spain, Portugal and sundry other regions of Southern Europe continued to use B.C. 38 to calculate Easter. Successively Catalonia in 1180, Aragon in 1350, Valencia in 1358, Castile in 1382 and Portugal in 1420 all adopted A.D.1 as the base to calculate Easter.

The medieval historian R.L. Poole uses as an example a traveller going from Venice to France. The traveller might start from Venice on 1st March 1245 (the beginning of the Venetian year) arriving several days later in Florence in 1244 and a few days later in Pisa in 1246. Provence would be reached after several more days but now in 1245 and finally arriving in France in 1244. A journey, at that time of several weeks, encompassed three different years.

For the Christian Calendar the importance lay in calculating the date for Easter. Meanwhile secular date computations were calculated on 15 year cycles to the base A.D. 312. At this

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