Sent in by William – see www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2019/03/18/the-hundred-years-war-the-fires-of-t… … is a guest post by Peter Mungo Jupp who runs the Ancient Origins web site. Around AD1348 there began the Hundred Years War, a series of skirmishes and full blooded battles that broke out between the kings of England and their former lands in France (as part of the Norman expansion several centuries earlier). It included the famous battles of Agincourt, Crecy, and Poitiers – which have gone down deep into the national psyche of both sides. However, much of the rest of Europe was also involved in internecine conflict – including those regions of France never claimed by the Normans. Wars were actually global – breaking out in far away places such as SE Asia and the Pacific. The empire of Angkor fell to invading Thais and in China, in 1368, the Han replaced the Mongols as the ruling dynast (after a period of conflict and upheaval). In the Pacific there was mass abandonment of settlements and warlike resettlement elsewhere – the Maoris in New Zealand for example. However, the same was true of the Solomon Islands, Hawaii, and Easter Island. Dynasties fell across Africa and South America. In parallel the Black Death (the plague) left behind a trail of dead people – with estimates of a quarter to a third of the population of Europe. Some villages were virtually decimated. Written accounts from the time mention curious phenomena such as heavenly fire, earthquakes, storm and tempest. Comets and fiery pillars in the sky are recorded, destructive lightning events and fiery meteors. There were changes in climate, sea levels went up or down, and even reclamation of land from bog to productive field is recorded. Jupp then brings in Henrik Svensmark – and cloud cover affected by cosmic rays. In the Wolf solar minimum of the 14th century cosmic rays would have been more common than normal. Jupp wonders if a solar minimum might affect the weather on earth. Do cosmic rays also affect bacterial virulence he asks. It was not just humans who were overwhelmed by the plague. Cattle and farm animals also were affected – even fish in rivers and ponds.
At this point he turns to the Maori legends of the fires of Tamatea – landscape fires and tsunami waves he claims (bringing in the research of Ted Bryant). This was when the giant Moa bird became extinct – usually blamed on Maori hunters. However, C14 dating cluster around the mid 14th century for the evidence of disaster. Was an airburst event involved? Tapanui, he says, translates as 'the big explosion'. Likewise, Australian Aboiriginal myth dovetails into the same events, he says, when the deadly fire the sky filled the whole space between the sky and the ground, precipitating floods etc. Could enything like this happen again and would the modern world be able to cope?