Welcome to the British History Podcast. My name is Jamie and this is episode 197, the

Suns of Ragnar Lothbrock. This show is free and independent due to

member support and as thanks for helping keep the community going I offer members only

content including extra episodes and rough transcripts. Here's a sample of what the members

are listening to right now. You had all kinds of different ways that Easter could be calculated

and we see in records that early Christians would check in with their Jewish neighbors

and find out when Passover was happening and then plan to celebrate Easter on the Sunday

of that week. So the big takeaway is that early on this was all dictated by the Jewish

calendar. However that made some Christians a bit grumpy because the Jewish calendar

was a lunar calendar and a lunar calendar is 11 days shorter than a solar calendar. And

while dealing with leap years as a pain in the butt, a lunar year has to deal with nearly

two weeks of extra days. They're called E-Packs, at least I think that's how you pronounce

it. And the crazy thing about E-Packs is when you end up with more than 30 of them, you

trade them in for an extra month that's inserted into the calendar. Seriously, that's

how that works. Consequently, figuring out when Easter was was really difficult on a

lunar calendar. And that was driving some Christians bananas, B-A-N-A-N-A-S. If you'd like

to support the show and listen to this episode and others like them, you can sign up for membership

over at the British History Podcast dot com. And thank you very much to John, Tammy, and

Stephanie for signing up already.

What a major turning point for Britain. The Great Heathen Army is arriving on the northern

shores. And as a consequence, I've been rocking my brain for weeks trying to figure

out how best to tell you this story and deal with the Great Heathen Army because it has

...