Please don’t shoot me for reentering such a touchy area but, I need comment on the following:

“Politically Artois had only been French control for less than a century and a half and that period had ended 330 years previously.”  [context is a discussion of a 1569 tax roll of Artois].

I read this sentence and wondered whether the first ‘had been’ should have been ‘was.’

 

Scott Catledge