At www.pereplet.ru/gorm/atext/newton1.htm … a paper by Robert Newton that was presented to the AAAS Symposium on 28th December 1971 has turned up on a Russian web site. They are interested in this sort of thing. In the west, CAGW and its spin-offs seems to dominate all science chat and research. Robert Newton also wrote a couple of important books – one at least was reviewed in SIS Review (by Laurence Dixon), quite recently.
Newton's interest was non-gravitational forces on the Earth-Moon system. He claims to have found an acceleration of the Earth's spin and of the Moon's mean angular velocity between AD700 and 1300. The difference was a factor of 5. Is it just an accident that the two recently defined events, at AD775/6 (a huge increase in comsic radiation) and the AD1253/8 – see upcoming SIS Workshop for Steve Mitchell's latest article, this time focussed on these two events, and the possibility the event at 1258 (mass grave in Spitalfields, London) was sparked by events that occurred in 1253 (and a flavour of what that might be can be found in Matthew of Paris record of the 1240s and 1250s, a monk at St Albans Abbey). As good an excuse to renew your membership as I can think of – for the moment.
In the book reviewed by Laurence Dixon there is a graph showing the speed of rotation of the Earth which shows a sharp peak at about 770. There was a footnote to the effect that Newton said this was approximately the time when Normandy flooded. The Chinese also reported that they had to do a re-survey of some of their cities at this time (the 770s) as it seems east was no longer the east (or perhaps the translation of this is skewed in some way). Something happened in China to cause a re-survey, and they did it again around the time the Mongols invaded and took over the country (in the 1250s). Are the dates a coincidence?