On September 2, 1752, the people of Great Britain went to bed, and didn’t wake up again until the 14th.
What had happened? No, it wasn’t a country-wide epidemic of very specific comas – it was a change in the law. Two years previously, Parliament had passed the Calendar (New Style) Act 1750 – an act so radical that it reshaped the entire calendar year and, legend has it, sparked violent protests across the country.
So, what was so controversial?
Happy New Year… maybe?
The British calendar before 1750 was, to put it mildly, kind of a mess. It started on March 25, also known as Lady Day, for reasons that basically boil down to “well, if Jesus was born on December 25” – which he likely wasn’t, for the record – “then this must be when Mary got knocked up.”
However, the year still ended on December 31, and if you’re spotting a problem with this system, then, well, yeah. It wasn’t that those extra months in between didn’t exist – they were definitely there, it’s just that nobody was quite sure if they belonged to the year just gone or the one upcoming.
Seriously. Look at, say, the diary of Samuel Pepys, chronicler of such historical landmarks as the Great Fire of London and parmesan cheese burials, and the confusion is evident: December 31, 1661 is followed by “Wednesday 1 January 1661/62” – the dual dating system isn’t resolved until “24 March 1661/62” becomes “25 March 1662.”
To add to the confusion, even this haphazard system wasn’t standard throughout the country. In Scotland, the new year had begun, sensibly, on January 1 since 1600 – meaning that for quite a long time, someone in, say, Berwick-upon-Tweed could technically jog north for about half an hour and end up in next year.
It was, as we’re sure you can see, a very silly situation all round, and Parliament decided it had to end. “[In] England […] the Year beginneth on the 25th Day of March, [which] hath been found by Experience to be attended with divers Inconveniencies,” the Act begins, “not only as it differs from the Usage of neighbouring Nations, but also from the legal Method of Computation in that Part of Great Britain called Scotlond [sic], and […] frequent Mistakes are occasioned in the Dates of Deeds, and other Writings, and Disputes arise therefrom.”
Therefore, the act resolved, “the first Day of January next following the said last Day of December [1751] shall be reckoned, taken, deemed and accounted to be the first Day of the Year of our Lord 1752.”
To put it in more modern words: “we’re the only ones still starting the year in March, and it’s confusing everybody. From now on, the year starts on January 1.”
Goodbye Caesar
So, you’re an English dude in February 1748, and you decide to take a trip across the channel to France. You hop off the boat after leaving on the 1st, and arrive in Calais on… February 12, 1749.
See, compounding that whole “nobody except us starts the year in March” thing was the fact that an awful lot of Europe was using a completely different time system: the Gregorian calendar, decreed by Pope Gregory in 1582.
Adopting this new – well, newer – dating system would have had a couple of big benefits for Britain. First of all, it was more accurate – the Julian calendar, named after Julius Caesar, had assumed a year length of exactly 365.25 days, rather than the 365.2422 that it actually is (rookie mistake). The Gregorian system, on the other hand, set the length of the year at 365.2425 days – still not correct, but much closer.
Secondly, it would put Britain back on the same date as pretty much everyone else in Western Europe, which would at least be handy when it came to meeting appointments and suchlike. There was really only one downside to its adoption, which was that it was invented by a Catholic.
Britain, on the other hand, wasn’t just Protestant – its very existence sort of depended on its Protestantism. Ever since Henry VIII decided getting some tail was more important than staying friends with the Pope, the Church in England had been, well, the Church of England, and the head of both was whoever the current King or Queen was.
You might think that’s a silly objection, but it was the main reason the country hadn’t yet made the change from Julian to Gregorian: Queen Elizabeth had tried to reform the calendar not long after the new system’s invention in the 1580s, but the attempt was blocked by the church for being too Catholic; so too were subsequent attempts to adopt the Gregorian calendar in the 17th century.
Luckily, the Parliament of 1750 had a hack: just don’t mention the Pope. Rather than admit that their proposed new calendar had ever had anything to do with Catholicism, they instead set out a bunch of esoteric math which conveniently happened to arrive at the exact same dates as old Greg had set out, while notably being completely unrelated to anything the guy had ever said.
The kicker? So obvious was this “copy my homework, but make it look different” technique that when an actual mathematician looked over the workings, he found out that they were completely wrong. “The description copied into prayer-books from the Act of Parliament for the change of style is incorrect in two points,” pointed out Augustus De Morgan (yes, that one, math nerds in the audience); “it substitutes the day of full moon for the fourteenth day, and the moon of the heavens for the calendar moon.”
“But the details thus wrongly headed are, as intended, true copies of the Gregorian calendar,” he added. So that was lucky.
Give us our eleven days!
Of course, adopting the same time system as everyone else meant some big changes were going to have to happen – and by “big”, we mean “literally erasing a week and a half from the calendar.”
And it’s from this last measure that we see the Act’s most infamous consequences – because, supposedly, people were so alarmed by the disappearance of 11 days from September 1752 that they literally rioted in the streets.
The suggested reasons for the protests range from “yeah ok, I can see that” – would people be paid a full month’s wages? When would rent be due? And so on – to “okay, it was the past, but humans have surely never been that stupid” – ideas like people believing that they would now literally die 11 days earlier than they were previously going to (anybody due to die between September 2 and 14 would, presumably, become immortal).
But here’s the question: did it ever really happen?
Certainly, there are a couple of pieces of evidence for the so-called “calendar riots”. “Mak[e] no doubt that fires would be kindled again in Smithfield before the conclusion of the year,” reported one writer for the satirical magazine The World in the lead-up to the Act’s adoption – essentially a threat that people would riot in the streets like they had in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Or consider, for example, William Hogarth’s 1755 painting An Election Entertainment, depicting that year’s Oxfordshire election – the scene is complete with angry protesters throwing projectiles and carrying a banner reading “Give Us Our Eleven Days.”
And… that’s it, actually. No other contemporary evidence exists that anybody rioted over the calendar changes, and even these two sources need to be taken with a hefty grain – nay, lump – of salt.
Both were openly intended as satire; the first doesn’t even record protests, merely the threat of them, and the second, most historians agree, was really more of a comment on that specific election than anything else – it was a particularly weird and vitriolic one, filled with antisemitic and anti-Catholic slurs, violence in the streets, and political appeals to the good old days when England was still proudly 11 days behind those dastardly foreigners. The “scene” in the painting wasn’t a picture from reality, but an illustration – a cartoon – and it would have been understood as such by the audience of the time.
So, did people really riot over 11 missing days in 1752? Almost certainly not. In fact, the strongest protests against the new calendar seem to have come from politicians, not the people – who, let’s face it, were probably just relieved to have nailed down the date of New Year’s Day at long last.
