Lea Professor of Medieval History Thomas N. Bisson noted that relatively few people knew what the date was in 1000, and few people cared. The time of the new millennium was already a time of crisis, with a rapid increase in the numbers of castles and knights, Bisson said.
But Landes disagreed with their dismissal of first millennium tensions, and said that scribes manipulated the dates at the end of the millennium because they feared an apocalypse. They shifted their interpretation of the beginning of "A.D." to avoid the year 1000.
The church in France preached that the year 1000 was the end of days and the final judgement, according to Landes, which would mean the peasants were aware of the millennium--and feared it.
But "millennialism is entirely a social construct," he conceded.