The place is England, the year is 787AD. You ask a free merchant or castle guard in what year it is, what would he say?
What would a scribe for a noble or king say?
What would the noble or king say?
And a serf?
How does this make you feel? (It’s the “new” history!)
Discuss possible reasons why these differing numbers exist, if at all, and discuss how we came to the year number we assign that date today.
From the Wikipedia article “Anno Domini”:
Just about anybody would say that it is the 30th year of the reign of Offa.
Maybe yes, maybe no. There were 6 kingdoms in England at the time and Offa was king of two of them. As you can see from this rather interesting chart, he became king of Mercia in 758 but not king of Kent until 779 (and still later became king of East Anglia). So Mercians would say it was his 30th year, Kenters (Kentese?, Kentonians?, whatever) might say it was his 8th or 9th year and the other kingdoms will say different kings altogether.
By 787 official documents in most of the English kingdoms - and particularly in Mercia - were already using A.D. dates (or, to be precise, the annus ab incarnatione domini), although this was only a recent development and they were often used in conjunction with regnal dates. The usual assumption that it was Bede who had been the key influence seems reasonable enough. It should also be noted that everyone using A.D. dates counted from the same A.D. 1 (however wrong that may have been).
Beyond that the whole question becomes almost impossible to answer, as such official documents make up the bulk of the surviving documentary evidence and most of the other types of documents that do survive from that period tend to be undated.
And then there’s the fact that for most people and for most purpose, the idea that the year had a number would have been simply irrelevant.
I think they’d all say, “It’s 1,219 years before garygnu asks a very interesting question about historical dating. Hi, Opal!”