Fist, apologies, a few minutes ago, I accidentally pressed post on my iPad when I had only an incomplete version of this post. That incomplete version is now deleted.

Douglas Richardson's books give a death date of 19-25 March 1368 for the John de Eure who was born in 1302: "Magna Carta Ancestry", 2nd edition, Vol. II, p. 125 and ”Royal Ancestry", Vol. II, p. 524. This would appear to be a slip.

Joseph Foster's book of the 1584/5 and 1612 Yorkshire visitations gives a death date of Saturday in the 4th week of Lent in 1367/8 - Joseph Foster, "The Visitation of Yorkshire made in the years 1584/5... to which is added the subsequent Visitation made in 1612, with several additional pedigrees", privately printed 1875, pp. 610-612, https://archive.org/details/McGillLibrary-hssl_visitation-yorkshire_CS437Y4A2-19990/page/n633/mode/2up. If 1367/8 is the regnal year, that would mean 1367.

In the Close Rolls is an order, dated 26 October 1367, to John de Scotherskelf escheator in Yorkshire and Northumberland "not to meddle further with the manor of Stokeslay and other lands taken into the king's hand by the death of John de Eure knight, delivering to Robert his son any issues thereof taken" - "Calendar of the Close Rolls, Edward III, Vol. XII, A.D. 1364-1368", HMSO, 1910, p. 354, https://archive.org/details/abd4709.0012.001.umich.edu/page/354/mode/2up?q=eure. So John de Eure died before this.

Finally, John's Inquisitions Post Mortem, held in 1367-8, state that he died on "Saturday in the fourth week of Lent, 40 Edward III". 40 Edward III is Jan 1366-Jan 1367. If my calculations are right - and they may not be - this gives a death date of 14 March 1366. - M C B Dawes and J B W Chapman, 'Inquisitions Post Mortem, Edward III, File 193', in "Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem: Volume 12, Edward III" (London, 1938), pp. 105-118, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/inquis-post-mortem/vol12/pp105-118

On Sunday, March 6, 2022 at 2:21:22 AM UTC-8, michae...@gmail.com wrote:

I am going to address these in reverse order, but I think all of the differences are explicable through a series of simple, if sloppy, errors. (And sorry for the overly-long post, but this is the kind of trainwreck that takes a lot of explaining to pick apart.)

> Finally, John's Inquisitions Post Mortem, held in 1367-8, state that he died
> on "Saturday in the fourth week of Lent, 40 Edward III". 40 Edward III is Jan
> 1366-Jan 1367. If my calculations are right - and they may not be - this gives
> a death date of 14 March 1366.

I am not going to duplicate your Lent calculation here, other than to say that the period of Lent in 40 E III would indeed fall in 1366 (modern style)..

> Joseph Foster's book of the 1584/5 and 1612 Yorkshire visitations gives a
> death date of Saturday in the 4th week of Lent in 1367/8. . . . . If 1367/8 is
> the regnal year, that would mean 1367.

Clearly Foster's date derives from the ipm, but contains an error in converting the regnal year of 40 Edward III into AD. I suspect for reasons that are unimportant here that the calculation was not done by Foster, but rather was already in his visitation manuscript source. Taking 1367/8 as a rendering of regnal year, it would represent a one-year error in calculation, a type of error that I see occasionally (and that I sometimes make when my head isn't in the game) of simply adding the regnal year to the accession year of the monarch, forgetting to take into account in the mathamatics that there is no regnal year 0. The result is to get a year one later than the actual one.

> Douglas Richardson's books give a death date of 19-25 March 1368 for the
> John de Eure who was born in 1302: . . . . This would appear to be a slip.

This is from two further slips, one building on the error present in Foster's visitation. First, note that Richardson's date range is a full seven days rather than a precise date. The likely explantaion for this is a misreading of "Saturday in the fourth week of Lent" as simply "the fourth week of Lent". While I haven't bothered for the purposes of this message to determine when the 4th week of Lent fell in 1368, I presume that is what the precise 7-day span represents.

What about the year, which we know from the Close Roll entry to be completely impossible? Two successive errors have occured. First, we have the error we see in Foster's publication, of someone misconverting 40 E III into Anno Domini as "1367/8" rather than 1366/7. In doing so, they not only made an error, but they laid the groundwork for the second error. Given Edward III's January succession date it would have been entirely straightforward to determine that a day in the 4th week of Lent would have fallen in the first year of the regnal bi-year, 1367 for a 1367/8 regnal year. However, it was actually frustratingly not uncommon for antiquarians not to bother with this simple calculation, and to express the full AD bi-year rather than determine which individual year was appropriate.

This created an ambiguity because the same orthographic rendering (year/year) came to be used to indicate an entirely different phenomenon, the change from a 25 March new year to 1 January. From the late 16th century through the late 17th as the trend toward the modern form gained steam, one often sees dates falling between 1 January and 25 March represented using both years, again separated by a slash. Thus, rather than referring to a regnal bi-year, a date of 1367/8 might instead be seen as old-style/new-style (hereafter O/N) Anno Domini dating, to indicate that the date fell in 1367 using the 25th March date for the new year, but in 1368 with a 1 January start. (This ambiguity between regnal and O/N bi-year dating would have been easily avoided by the simple extra step of resolving the regnal bi-year into its correct year.)

While it is not uncommon practice in modern times for historians and genealogists to render historical dates falling between the two new year dates using O/N bi-year representation, Mr. Richardson has here vehemently championed resolving them to show only the modern year formulation. That is what he has seemingly done in this case. Though the 1367/8 (sic) year originally represented an unresolved regnal bi-year, placing the event in 1367 (sic), he interpreted it as O/N bi-year dating and resolved it into his prefered modern-only style, which instead places it in 1368 (sic).

So, how we get from the ipm date first to Foster's and then to Richardson's dates is: 1) misrendering the regnal year 40 E III as 1367/8, 2) misinterpreting 1367/8 as O/N dating and resolving it to 1368, 3) accidentally dropping the specific day (Saturday) within the 4th week of Lent, and finally, 4) calculating the 4th week of Lent based on the wrong year. Unfortunately, by now these erroneous dates are going to be all over the internet crowdsourced genealogies, so we are stuck with them.

taf