The Calendar Riot-a History of a Myth

Have you heard, I wonder, of the Calendar Riot of 1752, when people in England took exception to the 'loss' of eleven days of their lives when the old Julian Calander was replaced by the Gregorian? A wonderful story but-alas-a fiction, one that has been repeated time and again. It even makes an appearance in the relevant edition of the Oxford History of England. Encyclopedia Britannica once put these alleged riots down to the 'vulgar and ignorant prejudice of the mob'.

It's one of these stories that everyone seems to know about but nobody can quite pinpoint. The whole thing is a wonderful example of the circularity that one tends to find in certain forms of historical reportage: textbooks cited textbooks which cited other textbooks, and so on and so on! In other words, it was an event quite without witness. All such references are reducible to two sources only: to Lord Chesterfield and to William Hogarth.

It was Chesterfield who was behind the Calendar Reform Act of 1751. In one of his letters to his son he writes, "Every numerous assembly is a mob, let the individuals who compose it be what they will. Mere sense is never to be talked to a mob; their passions, their sentiments, their senses and their seeming interests alone are to be applied to. Understanding have they collectively none." But what he was doing here was boasting of his skill in having the Bill passed through the Lords. The 'mob' in question was his fellow peers!

So, this only leaves Hogarth's 1755 depiction of An Election Entertainment, in which a placard is shown, carrying the slogan 'Give us our eleven days.' According to Ronald Paulson, author of Hogarth, His Life, Art and Times, this shows that "...the Oxfordshire people...are specifically rioting, as historically the London crowd did, to preserve the 'Eleven Days' the government stole from them in September 1752 by changing the calendar."

And thus it was that the 'calendar riot' was born. The only problem is that the election campaign depicted was one which concluded in 1754, after a very lengthy contest between Court Whigs and Jacobite Tories. Literally every issue between the two factions was brought up, including the question of calendar reform. The Tories attacked the Whigs for every deviation, including their alleged favoritism towards foreign Jews and the 'Popish' calendar. Hogarth's placard, in his usual rumbustious fashion, is no more than part of a satire on the character of the debate. It was not an observation of actual crowd behaviour. The whole thing, as one author has rightly said, was simply a 'magnificent myth.'

Years of Our Lord

More snippets from the archives!

Have you ever thought about the dating system we use in the west? No, well, neither did I until I read a brief exegesis on the whole question. I suppose it should really come as no great surprise to learn that for centuries after the birth of Christ few people had any idea that they were living in the Christian era. Indeed the idea that the years should be counted from the Day of Annunciation only emerged in the sixth century, in the work of a Greek-speaking monk known as Dionysius Exiguus. The point in time he fixed for Day One Year One was 25 March, nine months before the commonly accepted birth of Christ on 25 December. All previous years were to be ‘Before Christ’, and all subsequent years Anni Domini, Years of our Lord.

But more centuries were to elapse before this notion was generally accepted. In England it first came when Venerable Bede accepted the chronology advanced by Dionysius in his History of the English Church and People, written in the early eighth century. Before this several dating systems had been in operation, the most common being the regnal year of a ruling king, pope or emperor.