Anyone in England, Wales, Ireland or the American colonies who went to sleep on Wednesday 2 September 1752 woke up on Thursday 14 September. The eleven days in between did not happen. They were not skipped in the sense of being holidays. They were removed from the calendar by Act of Parliament.
The story most people know is that mobs filled the streets shouting give us back our eleven days. That part is very largely an invention, and where it came from is a better story than the riot.
The Error Being Corrected
The Julian calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar in 46 BC, assumes a year of exactly 365.25 days and inserts one leap day every four years to make the arithmetic work.
The actual tropical year, the interval between one spring equinox and the next, is about 365.2422 days. The Julian year is therefore too long by roughly eleven minutes.
Eleven minutes a year is nothing. Over four centuries it is about three days, and by the sixteenth century the accumulated drift had reached ten. The equinox, which the Council of Nicaea in 325 had effectively pinned to 21 March for the purpose of calculating Easter, was arriving on 11 March.
The length of the year had been known with reasonable precision for a very long time. Hipparchus measured it in the second century BC and got within about six minutes, and Ptolemy’s Almagest passed the figure on. The problem was never ignorance. It was that changing the calendar requires an authority everyone will obey.
Gregory’s Fix
Pope Gregory XIII issued the bull Inter gravissimas in February 1582. The scheme had been worked out largely by the physician Aloysius Lilius, whose brother submitted it after his death, and refined by the Jesuit mathematician Christopher Clavius.
It does two things. It deletes ten days once, to put the equinox back where Nicaea had it, so that in Catholic Europe 4 October 1582 was followed by 15 October. And it changes the leap year rule so the drift does not return: century years are leap years only if divisible by 400, which removes three leap days every four centuries. The resulting average year is 365.2425 days, wrong by about 26 seconds, which will need attention in a few thousand years.
Catholic states adopted it immediately. Protestant Europe did not, for the straightforward reason that it had been issued by the Pope. Britain held out for 170 years, during which English dates and continental dates differed by ten days and then, after 1700, by eleven.
This is why correspondence of the period is full of double dates, and why the historical record is a minefield. Britain also began its legal year on 25 March rather than 1 January, so a date such as 20 February 1719 in an English document falls in what everyone else called 1720.
The Act
The Calendar (New Style) Act of 1750 was steered through Parliament by Lord Chesterfield, with the technical content supplied by the Earl of Macclesfield and by James Bradley, then Astronomer Royal at the observatory Flamsteed had established at Greenwich.
Chesterfield later wrote, with some pride, that he had deliberately avoided astronomy in his speech because his audience would not have followed it, and had made the case on the grounds of commercial convenience instead. Macclesfield gave the technical speech, which nobody listened to.
The Act did three things: it moved the start of the legal year to 1 January from 1752, deleted eleven days that September, and adopted the Gregorian leap year rule.
It was also written by people who had thought about the consequences. Rents, interest, wages and leases were not to be charged for the eleven missing days. Contracts and terms of office were adjusted so that nobody lost or gained time. Anyone due to be released from prison on a deleted date was released on the 14th.
Where the Riots Came From
There is very little contemporary evidence of disorder about the calendar. No newspaper reports of a riot on the subject in September 1752 have been found, and the change passed with a fair amount of grumbling and a certain amount of confusion.
The myth appears to have three sources.
- A Hogarth painting. An Election Entertainment, painted in 1755, shows a chaotic Tory banquet with a stolen Whig banner on the floor reading Give us our Eleven Days. The election it depicts is the Oxfordshire contest of 1754, in which the calendar reform was one of a number of grievances thrown at the Whig government by opponents. It is a piece of political satire about an election, not a record of a riot
- Genuine local disputes about dates, particularly over when fairs, hiring days and quarter days should be held, and over the date of Christmas. Some communities kept celebrating on the old dates for decades. A holly tree at Glastonbury that was said to flower at Christmas was reported to have ignored the new calendar, which was taken by some as divine comment
- Later retelling. Nineteenth century writers repeated the anecdote as fact, and it became the standard illustration of popular ignorance, which is how it has been used ever since
There is a real grievance underneath it, and it is about money rather than superstition. Workers paid by the day did lose eleven days of work in that month, and the protections in the Act covered rents and contracts more thoroughly than casual wages.
The Tax Year Never Recovered
The most durable consequence of 1752 is visible in Britain every April.
The financial year traditionally began on Lady Day, 25 March. The Treasury, unwilling to lose eleven days of revenue, moved the start of the tax year forward by eleven days to 5 April. In 1800 a further adjustment was made, because 1800 was a leap year under the old rule and not under the new one, and the date moved to 6 April.
The British personal tax year still begins on 6 April, and the reason is a calendar correction made in 1752 to compensate for a drift that began under Julius Caesar.
Everyone Else, Eventually
Britain was not the last. Sweden attempted a gradual transition by omitting leap days over forty years, abandoned it halfway through in confusion, and returned to the Julian calendar in 1712 by inserting an extra day, giving that country the only 30 February in history. It converted properly in 1753.
Japan changed in 1873, Russia in 1918, which is why the October Revolution took place in November, and Greece in 1923. The Orthodox churches largely retain the Julian calendar for liturgical purposes, which is why Orthodox Christmas falls on 7 January.
The Dates in the History Books
One consequence for anyone reading about the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is that dates need a label. Newton was born on Christmas Day 1642 by the calendar in use in England at the time, and on 4 January 1643 by the one the rest of Europe was using and that we use now. Both statements are correct.
George Washington was born on 11 February 1731 old style, and celebrated his birthday on 22 February 1732 new style once the change came in. Historians write dates from this period as OS or NS for exactly this reason.
The eleven missing days are the most visible edit ever made to the shared record of when things happened. What makes it remarkable is not that people objected but that they mostly did not: an entire society agreed to renumber the days on the strength of an astronomical argument almost none of them could follow.
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