The Calendar Act of 1750 and eleven lost days

Transcript
0:00 Hi, I’m the History Guy. I have a degree in history and I love history,
0:04 and if you love history too, this is the channel for you.
0:07 Here's an interesting question of historical trivia. What important historical event occurred
0:15 on September 5th of 1752, in England? If you don't immediately know, you can try to divide
0:22 it from the period. George the Second was King of England, Henry Pelham was Prime Minister,
0:26 England was not technically at war, but they were conducting a proxy war against the French
0:31 on the Indian subcontinent. And in the colonies, Ben Franklin conducted his famous electricity
0:36 experiment with his kite earlier in the year in 1752. And if you still don't know what important
0:42 event happened on September 5th, it's in fact a trick question. No historical events of any
0:47 importance occurred in England on September 5th of 1752, and we know that because there was no
0:53 September 5th…in England…in 1752. And the reason why, is a story that deserves to be remembered.
1:02 There's archaeological evidence that people had methods of keeping time based on the
1:07 lunar cycles as far back as the Neolithic period. In 2013, archaeologists discovered
1:12 a group of pits in Aberdeenshire in England, that appear to correspond with the phases of
1:17 the Moon that dates back some 10,000 years, and may be the world's oldest known lunar calendar,
1:23 although there is some dispute over that claim. As the phases of the Moon are easy to observe,
1:27 they serve as an effective method of tracking time, and lunar calendars are still used today
1:32 by some cultures, to determine religious holidays. And while it makes sense to track time based on
1:37 the phases of the Moon, there is a problem. As the moon is not in sync with the Sun, and thus,
1:42 12 lunar periods is only 354 days. Well short of a solar year. The period of time required
1:48 for the earth to make one complete revolution around the Sun. The problem is that tracking
1:53 time by the moon means that lunar months will cycle through the seasons, making a lunar
1:58 calendar a poor tool regarding one of the most important reasons to track months, agriculture.
2:02 The problem is usually addressed through a process called intercalation, in which
2:07 additional days are added in order to sync a lunar calendar with the seasons. Since a solar year does
2:14 not include a whole number of lunar months, most so-called, lunisolar calendars, count
2:19 12 lunar months as a year, but add an additional month every 2 or 3 years, in order to resync the
2:25 calendar with the seasons. And thus, different years will have different numbers of days.
2:29 There are various methods of interpolation used for lunisolar calendars, although the one used
2:34 by the Banks Islands of Vanuatu based on the spawning cycle of the Palolo worm,
2:38 is perhaps the most interesting. The early Roman calendar was such a lunar solar calendar. The
2:44 Romans tried to synchronize the months with the first crescent moon following a new moon,
2:47 resulting in some months of 29 days, and some months more. They then used intercalation
2:52 to sync the calendar, every other year they would shorten February, and add a leap month,
2:56 or intercalaris. That process is still the reason that February has 28 days on the modern calendar.
3:02 Roman debts were typically due on the first of each month, called the calendae, and payments were
3:07 tracked in a ledger book called the calendaria, which is the genesis of the term calendar.
3:12 But the process was still imperfect, adding approximately four days every four years,
3:17 too much to be in line with the solar year, and of course over time that would show,
3:22 as the calendar would no longer be in sync with the seasons. So in 46 BC, Julius Caesar consulted
3:28 a Greek astronomer named Sosigenes of Alexandria, to create a better calendar. The new calendar
3:34 divided a 365 day year into 12 months, with some months 31 days, and some 30, but retaining the
3:40 shortened 28-day February. But an intercalation was still required to keep the calendar in sync,
3:45 and so one additional day was added to February every four years. The so-called Julian calendar
3:51 was used by edict throughout the empire, but it still had a flaw. The average length of a year
3:56 on the Julian calendar is 365.25 days, but a solar year is actually slightly shorter,
4:02 365.2425 days. A difference of three days every 400 years, or about 2/10 of 1%.
4:10 That seems small, but over enough time it became a problem, and was most noticeable in
4:16 terms of a specific religious holiday, Easter. Easter is the most important Christian feast,
4:21 and it's date traditionally was determined based on a solar event, the vernal equinox.
4:24 But the day was actually fixed by the calendar, and Caesar's two-tenths of a percent discrepancy
4:29 meant that over sixteen hundred years later, Easter was no longer landing where Easter had
4:33 traditionally been celebrated by early Christians relative to the vernal equinox. And so in 1582,
4:39 Pope Gregory the thirteenth introduced a calendar reform called, the Gregorian calendar,
4:43 that adjusted the Julian calendar so that rather than a leap year every four years, every year
4:49 that was exactly divisible by four would be a leap year, except for years that were exactly
4:53 divisible by 100. But those century years are leap years, if they are exactly divisible by 400.
5:00 And so, for example, the year 2000 should have been a leap year because 2,000 is
5:05 evenly divisible by four, but should not have been a leap year because 2,000 is
5:10 evenly divisible by 100, but was a leap year because 2,000 is evenly divisible by 400.
5:16 The Gregorian calendar is the calendar most commonly used, at least for civil purposes,
5:21 throughout the world today. But that was still a problem. In 1501, King Henry the
5:25 Seventh of England's oldest son, Arthur the Prince of Wales, married Catherine of Aragon,
5:29 the youngest surviving child of King Ferdinand II of Aragon, and Queen Isabella the first of
5:34 Castile. The goal of the marriage was to cement an alliance between England and Spain, but just
5:40 20 weeks after being married, Arthur died of a sweating sickness. Still trying to make a marital
5:45 alliance with Spain, Henry the seventh betrothed his dead son's bride to his second son Henry, just
5:50 11 years old. Although the two did not actually marry until 1509, after Henry ascended to the
5:55 throne as Henry the eighth, following his father's death. But by 1525 Henry became frustrated as he,
6:01 and Catherine, had failed to produce a male heir. One son had died after just seven weeks,
6:05 and two more had been stillborn. Moreover, Henry had fallen in love with another woman,
6:09 Anne Boleyn, who refused to be seduced so long as she could not be queen. That prompted Henry
6:14 to seek an annulment from the Pope, Pope Clement the seventh, claiming that his marriage was
6:18 blighted in the eyes of God, because Catherine had been his brother's widow. The Pope refused
6:23 on multiple grounds. One of which might well have been that following the sack of Rome in 1527,
6:28 the Pope was being held prisoner by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles the Fifth, who happened to be
6:32 Catharine of Aragon's nephew. Frustrated, Henry the eighth married Anne Boleyn anyway in 1533,
6:38 and the Pope responded by excommunicating Henry, causing England to break with the
6:42 Roman Catholic Church, and establish the independent Church of England in 1534.
6:46 And England and the Pope were still not on good terms 48 years later, when Pope Gregory
6:51 changed the calendar. While the Gregorian calendar became Catholic Canon via a papal bull in 1582,
6:56 most Protestant nations, like England, thumbed their nose at Gregory and continued on with
7:00 the Julian calendar. In fact, Henry's daughter, Elizabeth the first, briefly considered adopting
7:05 a similar reform, but gave up under opposition from Anglican Church bishops who argued that
7:10 the Pope was literally, the biblical fourth Great Beast of Daniel. The split was still
7:15 an issue in 1754. Understand that George II was only King because, in his grandmother's time,
7:21 50 Catholics who were higher in line for the throne have been excluded, based on acts of
7:26 parliament, that restricted the royal succession to Protestants. But much of the rest of Europe
7:31 had switched in the intervening time, including the other half of the United Kingdom, Scotland,
7:35 which had moved to the Gregorian calendar under King James the sixth, in 1600. And Parliament
7:40 complained, “That because of the discrepancy in dates between England and most of her neighbors.
7:44 Frequent mistakes are occasioned in the dates of deeds, and other writings, and
7:48 disputes arise therefrom.” And so, the Calendar Act of 1750 moved England to what was, in effect,
7:55 the Gregorian calendar, without actually using that name. To facilitate the change,
8:00 and sync with their neighbors, eleven days had to be removed from the calendar in 1752,
8:04 to account for the effect of nearly 18 centuries of Julius Caesar's two-tenths
8:09 of a percent miscalculation. Citizens of England went to bed on September 2nd 1752, and woke up the
8:16 next day on September 14th. Nothing happened on September 5th, because there was no September 5th.
8:23 In addition to moving England to the Gregorian calendar, the Calendar Act of 1750 also made the
8:28 official start of the new year in England, January 1st. Prior to the Calendar Act,
8:31 the New Year actually started in England on March 25th. There has been some historical argument that
8:37 there were riots based on the Calendar Act, that people are in the streets shouting, “Give us back
8:40 our lost 11 days!” But most historians agree now that no riots occurred, and that that myth started
8:45 because of a misunderstanding of some political satire that is written to make fun of Tories, who
8:49 tried to make the calendar reform an issue in the election of 1755. England was by no means the last
8:54 country to move to the Gregorian calendar. Sweden, for example, tried to start moving gradually,
8:59 starting at 1700, and taking out a day a year. But that resulted in a period where they were off
9:03 of both the Julian calendar and the Gregorian calendar, and so they gave that up, and they
9:07 didn't end up making the change actually until a year after England, when in 1753, they just made a
9:12 short February. Many Eastern European countries didn't actually make the move until the 20th
9:17 century. In Russia, for example, the move was not made until after the October Revolution of 1917,
9:21 and ironically, when the dates are adjusted, the October Revolution didn't occur until November.
9:27 Some nations today still use the Julian calendar to determine things like religious holidays,
9:31 but use the Gregorian calendar for civil business. Notably, former Protestant and Orthodox countries
9:37 adopted the solar part of the Gregorian calendar, but they rejected the lunar part, which was used
9:41 to determine the date of Easter. Instead they use a completely different calculation that comes to
9:46 the exact same answer, but doesn't give credit to a Catholic pope. And what might seem a historical
9:52 triviality to say that nothing happened in England between September 4th and September 13th of 1752,
9:58 because they skip those 11 days. It is undoubtedly extremely useful, that despite
10:03 all our other disagreements, the vast majority of the world at least agrees on today's date.
10:08 I'm the History Guy and I hope you enjoyed this edition of my series, 5 minutes of history,
10:12 short snippets of forgotten history five and ten minutes long. And if you did enjoy it, please go
10:15 ahead and click that thumbs up button which is there on your left. If you have any questions,
10:19 or comments, feel free to write those in the comment section, I'll be happy to respond. And
10:22 if you'd like five minutes more of forgotten history, all you need to do is subscribe.

My first encounter with this information was due to a plasticized playing-card-sized two-sided perpetual calendar that Popular Science mag used to send out for subscription renewals. Later I found that George Washington and the other Founders often wrote both their birth dates. Finally, doing genealogy, one runs across this somewhat often.

Nations changed their adoption of the Gregorian at different times, spanning over two hundred years I think (the last major one being the USSR, Russia was still on the old calendar).

http://www.medievalgenealogy.org.uk/guide/chron.shtml

When your most accurate timepiece is a sundial, then eleven ‘lost’ days are nothing to fret about..................

https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Adoption_of_the_Gregorian_calendar

“No historical events of any importance occurred in England on September 5th of 1752, and we know that because there was no September 5th…in England…in 1752”

What would be fun would be to just invent a bunch of fake “English historical events” for Sept. 5 1752, and put them up on a website. Then see how long before anyone notices.

When Pope Gregory XIII proposed the calendar change in 1582, he decreed that the day after October 4 would be October 15. The change at the time was only 10 days. St. Teresa of Avila died on the night of Oct. 4/15, 1582. Her feast day is Oct. 15 (Oct. 4 was already that of a major saint—Francis of Assisi). England waited until 1752 because it wasn’t going to follow a decree from the pope. Many Protestant countries also delayed but not as long as England did.

I lost 11 days! I want REPARATIONS!

</sarc>

>>Prior to the Calendar Act, the New Year actually started in England on March 25th.

Which makes dates in genealogical research more fun. Is the year for a date between 1/1 and 3/24 the original one or adjusted to current usage?

Would be a good thing to work into a reboot of “Back to the Future”.

Sounds like an episode of Dr. Who. The TARDIS refuses to go to London on September 5th 1752 saying that it doesn’t exist.

eleven days to stop the curve...

Interesting trivia: Alaska once had two Fridays in a row.

The United States flag was raised on October 18, 1867 (N.S.), now called Alaska Day, and the region changed from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar. Therefore, for residents, Friday, October 6, 1867 was followed by Friday, October 18, 1867—two Fridays in a row because of the 12 day shift in the calendar minus one day for the date-line shift.

After October 6, 1867 (O.S., October 17, N.S.) Alaska assigned the day to the date of the preceding sunrise in Washington, instead of the date of the next sunrise in Moscow. Instead of being Moscow time + 13 HR they were Washington Time - 4 HR. Which meant it was Friday all over again.

At the time that St. Teresa died, the day began at sunset, and since she was alive at the time of sunset on October 4th, the date of her death should be October 15th.

I never really understood why so many cultures and peoples wouldn’t just track moons and sun cycles separately?

The moon is easy, because you can see it waxing and waning with your own eyes every day, and most people can scratch off 14 days in their head without keeping strict track.

The solar year is much harder to keep track. Seasons change unpredictably, and if you live a stable life and your not nomadic or a sailor, you can see where the sun rises and sets using familiar landmarks. Even better to use a sun dial, the more accurate the taller and pointier it is. It just doesn’t work in bad weather, but who doesn’t have sunshine at least ever couple of days.

I guess the sense of need comes in when people want to assign moon phases to the year phases and have them both mean the same thing every year. It’s fine to schedule something 3 moons from now, or 2 years from now, but doesn’t work to tell someone that you’ll meet them 1 year and two moons from now. That would be differently interpreted than 15 moons and you’d be off by as much as those 8 days.

I always have fun when I lecture about our first and greatest President, George Washington. His birthday changed during his lifetime!

The reform was instigated by the Catholic Church. Catholic countries most adopted in immediately. Britain not until 1750. Russia not until 1917. Orthodox Churches still use the old calendar and have Christmas 2 weeks later.

.

The Orthodox Church is all wrong. The Gregorian calendar guarantees that March 21 will always be the beginning of Spring, etc.

Anyone who favors the Julian calendar is out of touch with the reality of the seasons.

Thanks!

Transcript
0:00	Hi, I’m the History Guy. I have a degree in history and I love history,
0:04	and if you love history too, this is the channel for you.
0:07	Here's an interesting question of historical trivia. What important historical event occurred
0:15	on September 5th of 1752, in England? If you don't immediately know, you can try to divide
0:22	it from the period. George the Second was King of England, Henry Pelham was Prime Minister,
0:26	England was not technically at war, but they were conducting a proxy war against the French
0:31	on the Indian subcontinent. And in the colonies, Ben Franklin conducted his famous electricity
0:36	experiment with his kite earlier in the year in 1752. And if you still don't know what important
0:42	event happened on September 5th, it's in fact a trick question. No historical events of any
0:47	importance occurred in England on September 5th of 1752, and we know that because there was no
0:53	September 5th…in England…in 1752. And the reason why, is a story that deserves to be remembered.
1:02	There's archaeological evidence that people had methods of keeping time based on the
1:07	lunar cycles as far back as the Neolithic period. In 2013, archaeologists discovered
1:12	a group of pits in Aberdeenshire in England, that appear to correspond with the phases of
1:17	the Moon that dates back some 10,000 years, and may be the world's oldest known lunar calendar,
1:23	although there is some dispute over that claim. As the phases of the Moon are easy to observe,
1:27	they serve as an effective method of tracking time, and lunar calendars are still used today
1:32	by some cultures, to determine religious holidays. And while it makes sense to track time based on
1:37	the phases of the Moon, there is a problem. As the moon is not in sync with the Sun, and thus,
1:42	12 lunar periods is only 354 days. Well short of a solar year. The period of time required
1:48	for the earth to make one complete revolution around the Sun. The problem is that tracking
1:53	time by the moon means that lunar months will cycle through the seasons, making a lunar
1:58	calendar a poor tool regarding one of the most important reasons to track months, agriculture.
2:02	The problem is usually addressed through a process called intercalation, in which
2:07	additional days are added in order to sync a lunar calendar with the seasons. Since a solar year does
2:14	not include a whole number of lunar months, most so-called, lunisolar calendars, count
2:19	12 lunar months as a year, but add an additional month every 2 or 3 years, in order to resync the
2:25	calendar with the seasons. And thus, different years will have different numbers of days.
2:29	There are various methods of interpolation used for lunisolar calendars, although the one used
2:34	by the Banks Islands of Vanuatu based on the spawning cycle of the Palolo worm,
2:38	is perhaps the most interesting. The early Roman calendar was such a lunar solar calendar. The
2:44	Romans tried to synchronize the months with the first crescent moon following a new moon,
2:47	resulting in some months of 29 days, and some months more. They then used intercalation
2:52	to sync the calendar, every other year they would shorten February, and add a leap month,
2:56	or intercalaris. That process is still the reason that February has 28 days on the modern calendar.
3:02	Roman debts were typically due on the first of each month, called the calendae, and payments were
3:07	tracked in a ledger book called the calendaria, which is the genesis of the term calendar.
3:12	But the process was still imperfect, adding approximately four days every four years,
3:17	too much to be in line with the solar year, and of course over time that would show,
3:22	as the calendar would no longer be in sync with the seasons. So in 46 BC, Julius Caesar consulted
3:28	a Greek astronomer named Sosigenes of Alexandria, to create a better calendar. The new calendar
3:34	divided a 365 day year into 12 months, with some months 31 days, and some 30, but retaining the
3:40	shortened 28-day February. But an intercalation was still required to keep the calendar in sync,
3:45	and so one additional day was added to February every four years. The so-called Julian calendar
3:51	was used by edict throughout the empire, but it still had a flaw. The average length of a year
3:56	on the Julian calendar is 365.25 days, but a solar year is actually slightly shorter,
4:02	365.2425 days. A difference of three days every 400 years, or about 2/10 of 1%.
4:10	That seems small, but over enough time it became a problem, and was most noticeable in
4:16	terms of a specific religious holiday, Easter. Easter is the most important Christian feast,
4:21	and it's date traditionally was determined based on a solar event, the vernal equinox.
4:24	But the day was actually fixed by the calendar, and Caesar's two-tenths of a percent discrepancy
4:29	meant that over sixteen hundred years later, Easter was no longer landing where Easter had
4:33	traditionally been celebrated by early Christians relative to the vernal equinox. And so in 1582,
4:39	Pope Gregory the thirteenth introduced a calendar reform called, the Gregorian calendar,
4:43	that adjusted the Julian calendar so that rather than a leap year every four years, every year
4:49	that was exactly divisible by four would be a leap year, except for years that were exactly
4:53	divisible by 100. But those century years are leap years, if they are exactly divisible by 400.
5:00	And so, for example, the year 2000 should have been a leap year because 2,000 is
5:05	evenly divisible by four, but should not have been a leap year because 2,000 is
5:10	evenly divisible by 100, but was a leap year because 2,000 is evenly divisible by 400.
5:16	The Gregorian calendar is the calendar most commonly used, at least for civil purposes,
5:21	throughout the world today. But that was still a problem. In 1501, King Henry the
5:25	Seventh of England's oldest son, Arthur the Prince of Wales, married Catherine of Aragon,
5:29	the youngest surviving child of King Ferdinand II of Aragon, and Queen Isabella the first of
5:34	Castile. The goal of the marriage was to cement an alliance between England and Spain, but just
5:40	20 weeks after being married, Arthur died of a sweating sickness. Still trying to make a marital
5:45	alliance with Spain, Henry the seventh betrothed his dead son's bride to his second son Henry, just
5:50	11 years old. Although the two did not actually marry until 1509, after Henry ascended to the
5:55	throne as Henry the eighth, following his father's death. But by 1525 Henry became frustrated as he,
6:01	and Catherine, had failed to produce a male heir. One son had died after just seven weeks,
6:05	and two more had been stillborn. Moreover, Henry had fallen in love with another woman,
6:09	Anne Boleyn, who refused to be seduced so long as she could not be queen. That prompted Henry
6:14	to seek an annulment from the Pope, Pope Clement the seventh, claiming that his marriage was
6:18	blighted in the eyes of God, because Catherine had been his brother's widow. The Pope refused
6:23	on multiple grounds. One of which might well have been that following the sack of Rome in 1527,
6:28	the Pope was being held prisoner by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles the Fifth, who happened to be
6:32	Catharine of Aragon's nephew. Frustrated, Henry the eighth married Anne Boleyn anyway in 1533,
6:38	and the Pope responded by excommunicating Henry, causing England to break with the
6:42	Roman Catholic Church, and establish the independent Church of England in 1534.
6:46	And England and the Pope were still not on good terms 48 years later, when Pope Gregory
6:51	changed the calendar. While the Gregorian calendar became Catholic Canon via a papal bull in 1582,
6:56	most Protestant nations, like England, thumbed their nose at Gregory and continued on with
7:00	the Julian calendar. In fact, Henry's daughter, Elizabeth the first, briefly considered adopting
7:05	a similar reform, but gave up under opposition from Anglican Church bishops who argued that
7:10	the Pope was literally, the biblical fourth Great Beast of Daniel. The split was still
7:15	an issue in 1754. Understand that George II was only King because, in his grandmother's time,
7:21	50 Catholics who were higher in line for the throne have been excluded, based on acts of
7:26	parliament, that restricted the royal succession to Protestants. But much of the rest of Europe
7:31	had switched in the intervening time, including the other half of the United Kingdom, Scotland,
7:35	which had moved to the Gregorian calendar under King James the sixth, in 1600. And Parliament
7:40	complained, “That because of the discrepancy in dates between England and most of her neighbors.
7:44	Frequent mistakes are occasioned in the dates of deeds, and other writings, and
7:48	disputes arise therefrom.” And so, the Calendar Act of 1750 moved England to what was, in effect,
7:55	the Gregorian calendar, without actually using that name. To facilitate the change,
8:00	and sync with their neighbors, eleven days had to be removed from the calendar in 1752,
8:04	to account for the effect of nearly 18 centuries of Julius Caesar's two-tenths
8:09	of a percent miscalculation. Citizens of England went to bed on September 2nd 1752, and woke up the
8:16	next day on September 14th. Nothing happened on September 5th, because there was no September 5th.
8:23	In addition to moving England to the Gregorian calendar, the Calendar Act of 1750 also made the
8:28	official start of the new year in England, January 1st. Prior to the Calendar Act,
8:31	the New Year actually started in England on March 25th. There has been some historical argument that
8:37	there were riots based on the Calendar Act, that people are in the streets shouting, “Give us back
8:40	our lost 11 days!” But most historians agree now that no riots occurred, and that that myth started
8:45	because of a misunderstanding of some political satire that is written to make fun of Tories, who
8:49	tried to make the calendar reform an issue in the election of 1755. England was by no means the last
8:54	country to move to the Gregorian calendar. Sweden, for example, tried to start moving gradually,
8:59	starting at 1700, and taking out a day a year. But that resulted in a period where they were off
9:03	of both the Julian calendar and the Gregorian calendar, and so they gave that up, and they
9:07	didn't end up making the change actually until a year after England, when in 1753, they just made a
9:12	short February. Many Eastern European countries didn't actually make the move until the 20th
9:17	century. In Russia, for example, the move was not made until after the October Revolution of 1917,
9:21	and ironically, when the dates are adjusted, the October Revolution didn't occur until November.
9:27	Some nations today still use the Julian calendar to determine things like religious holidays,
9:31	but use the Gregorian calendar for civil business. Notably, former Protestant and Orthodox countries
9:37	adopted the solar part of the Gregorian calendar, but they rejected the lunar part, which was used
9:41	to determine the date of Easter. Instead they use a completely different calculation that comes to
9:46	the exact same answer, but doesn't give credit to a Catholic pope. And what might seem a historical
9:52	triviality to say that nothing happened in England between September 4th and September 13th of 1752,
9:58	because they skip those 11 days. It is undoubtedly extremely useful, that despite
10:03	all our other disagreements, the vast majority of the world at least agrees on today's date.
10:08	I'm the History Guy and I hope you enjoyed this edition of my series, 5 minutes of history,
10:12	short snippets of forgotten history five and ten minutes long. And if you did enjoy it, please go
10:15	ahead and click that thumbs up button which is there on your left. If you have any questions,
10:19	or comments, feel free to write those in the comment section, I'll be happy to respond. And
10:22	if you'd like five minutes more of forgotten history, all you need to do is subscribe.