From the Jersey Evening Post, 6 February 2024.

Not my original work, but an article I thought was so interesting that I wanted to put on record here.

Historian Doug Ford explains why Islanders, and UK residents, lost 11 days in the mid-1700s

IN The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams famously wrote: “Time is an Illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”

Philosophers can go on forever about objective reality versus subjective constructs and the arbitrary nature of perception, but, at its core, the concept of time is a human invention.

We use it as a means to organise and structure our lives, to measure the passing of moments, to order the past and to plan for the future and so it helps immensely if we are all on the same page.

In order to understand how we measure time today, it is necessary to go back just over 2,000 years to a period when the Romans were expanding their territory beyond the Mediterranean.

The Roman calendar at this point was a rather strange affair: a calendar year lasted 355 days, which meant that in order to keep the calendar in sync with the seasons an extra month was usually – but not always – added every two or three years.

In order to apply a bit more discipline to the calendar Julius Caesar introduced the Egyptian solar calendar to Rome in 46BCE. This new setup was named after him and became known as the Julian calendar. It was based on the calculation that the earth took 365 and ¼ days to travel around the sun. The year was divided into 12 months made up of 30 or 31 days, except for February, which usually contained 28 days.

Every fourth year – the “leap year” – an extra day is added to gather up the three previous quarter days. These leap years are also called intercalary or bissextile years (but not by many) and they help keep the calendar year synchronised with the astronomical or seasonal year.

Sadly, the Egyptians’ calculations were not entirely accurate. They were out by 11 minutes and 14 seconds per year and so, over the centuries, the Julian calendar gradually drifted away from measurable astronomical events such as the winter solstice and the spring equinox. By the 16th century it was determined that the calendar was ten days out, so, in order to correct this, in 1582 Pope Gregory XIII decreed that the day after 4 October should be 15 October. This new calendar would be named after him.

Unfortunately, the Reformation had divided Europe and so the new Gregorian calendar was adopted only by the Catholic countries such as Italy, France, Spain, Portugal and Flanders. Protestant countries such as England, Scotland, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden carried on using the Julian calendar.

Around 1700 the continental Protestant countries adopted the new calendar, leaving Britain and her colonies out of sync with most of their trading partners/rivals and so, in 1751, Parliament decided to align with the rest of Europe and decreed that Wednesday 2 September would be followed by Thursday, 14 September. There are stories of people taking to the streets of the larger towns demanding, “Give us back our 11 days!” But there is little evidence to back them up.

On 28 December 1751, the Royal Court registered the Act of Parliament which would see Jersey begin to follow the new Gregorian-style calendar, thus depriving Islanders of their 11 days as well.

Bizarrely, the island community of Foula, in Shetland, ignored the message and, while they don’t live by the Julian calendar (which is now another day out of sync) on a daily basis, they still celebrate Christmas and New Year’s Day 12 days after the rest of the UK.

The UK was by no means the last to change; the Eastern Orthodox and Greek Orthodox countries only adopted the Gregorian calendar between 1915 and 1923 and even then their churches continued to celebrate their important feast days according to the Julian system. 

Another change brought in by the same act was that the new year would start on 1 January 1752 instead of the old practice which saw the new year begin on Lady Day – 25 March. This brought the entire United Kingdom into line for the first time in over 150 years, as Scotland had been celebrating 1 January as the start of the new year since 1600.

The reason that the year had traditionally started on 25 March, popularly known as Lady Day as it was the celebration of the Feast of the Annunciation, was because it was the first of the “Quarter Days”. In the pre-industrial era most countries had an agricultural economy and following the dramatic fall in population in the middle of the 14th century due the Black Death, most labourers were hired on an annual contract.

As the majority of people were illiterate there needed to be a simple system so that everyone knew when contracts would begin and end. Because the Church played such a central part of most peoples’ lives, important fixed religious feast days approximately three months apart were chosen, as they could be easily remembered.

By splitting the year in four they became known as “Quarter Days” – the others being 24 June (the Feast of St John the Baptist), 29 September (Michaelmas or the Feast of St Michael and all Angels) and 25 December (Christmas Day).

Quarter Days became the four dates in each year on which servants were hired and rents were due. In Jersey, the Quarter Days were formalised on 25 April 1753 and confirmed in the Code of Laws of 1771 for letting houses. Rents for farms and lands were usually due on Christmas Day and money collected for the poor in the parish churches was distributed by the rector, Constable and other parish officials every Quarter Day as well.

All this may appear irrelevant to modern-day living, but it does explain why in England the financial year begins on 6 April.

While it may have been fine in 1752 for the working man to lose their 11 days it was definitely not the case for the country’s finances, and so the start of the tax year was pushed back 11 days to 5 April and then by another day in 1800, meaning it was moved to 6 April, where it has remained ever since.

Leap years

As a general rule of thumb, a year is a leap year if it can be divide by four, but, like all good rules, there has to be an exception and this applies to centurial years that have to be divisible by 400.Therefore, 1700, 1800 and 1900 were not leap years, but 2000 was.

Strangely, even though 29 February only comes around every four years, it is still a more common birthday than Christmas Day.