The previous way of finding the start of a term for a date had the following issues:

• it looked through all known term starts and compared against each. As the number of known-about terms increases, this is going to get slightly slow (particularly when looking up lots of dates)
• it will never return the last known-about term as it always finds a pair of term starts between which the given date falls

This narrows the search range down to a year either side of the date (I think this could be reduced further to the year before and the current year; however as it searches forwards in time, it should never reach the last year).

It will also return the last term when appropriate.