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Development of the Christian Calendar
by J F Horridge
The periods of time that regulate our daily lives are all based on the celestial orbits of the spinning earth around the sun and the moon around the earth. The ancient Egyptians are accredited with the initial regularisation of these natural periods, but the earliest practical calendar was supposedly devised by Romulus, the traditional founder and first king of Rome. This Roman calendar originally had a year of 304 days with 10 months; Martius, Aprilis, Maius, Junius, Quintilis, Sextilis, September, October, November and December.
Romulus's successor, Numa Pompilius, amended the calendar to better suit the lunar cycles by adding 51 days and two months, Januarius and Februarius, but these were subsequently relocated at the beginning of the year, thus displacing the last six numerically named months. The days were counted backwards from three fixed points in the month, the Kalends, the Nones and the Ides, and the seasons were regulated by the insertion of random periods. Events were generally referenced to the ruling king, or later to the consul in office, but eventually the years were numbered consecutively from 753 BC and suffixed AUC (Ab Urbe Condita - from Rome's foundation).
By the time Julius Caesar became Pontifex Maximus, the calendar had fallen into total confusion and advice on a possible rectification was sought from an Alexandrian astronomer, Sosigenes. He took a more accurate figure of 365¼ days for the tropical year (orbit of earth around sun) and produced a calendar of 365 days with an extra day included at the end of Februarius every fourth year which eventually became known as a Leap Year (On every fourth year the Sunday letter leapeth). The Julian Calendar was launched in 708 AUC (45 BC) and to reconcile the seasons, the previous year had included no less than 445 days; it became known as the `Year of Confusion`.A year later Julius Caesar changed the name of the month Quintilis to Julius and fifty years later Sextilis was renamed Augustus after the first emperor. The Julian Calendar went on to ably serve western Europe for more than sixteen centuries.
In the Christian Calendar, Easter Day is the most important as its date sets the time-table for the rest of the movable feasts. It had been decreed by the Nicaean Council in 1078 AUC (325 AD) to be the first Sunday after the full moon that falls on or after the vernal equinox. Therefore, to evolve a comprehensive method of defining Easter it was necessary to correlate the solar and lunar cycles.
A complete cycle of solar calendars transpires when all the days of the year recur on the same dates, and with the odd day in each year and the leap-year day every fourth year, the cycle calculates at 7 x 4 = 28 years. In 321 AUC (432 BC) an Athenian astronomer, Meton, had observed that, for all practical purposes, 235 lunar cycles of just over 29½ days were equivalent to 19 tropical years of 365¼ days (Metonic Cycle); and nine centuries later Victorius of Aquitine reasoned that the solar and lunar cycles must therefore coincide in 28 x 19 = 532 years which he named the Great Paschal (Passover) period.
About 500 AD, Dionysius Exiguus (Denis the Little), a Greek abbot and a renowned mathematician, was summoned to Rome by Pope St Gelasius I to organize the pontifical archives. Later at the request of Pope St John I he devised tables for establishing the date of Easter (still in use today slightly amended) and used the 532 year cycle for correlating the full moon to the day of the week at any time. He then took the current year 1285 AUC (532 AD) as the start of a new Passover period with the previous period beginning at year one (no digit 0 at the time). This date was generally believed to be the year of Christ's birth and the concept of numbering the years consecutively through the Christian Era was thus born. Other religions such as the Hindus, Muslims and Jews had (and still have) their own systems of reckoning the years from significant dates in their history.
Hipparchus, perhaps the greatest Hellenistic astronomer, had concluded as far back as 603 AUC (150 BC) mainly from his own observations, that the length of the tropical year was 365.242 days, one day in 125 years less than the figure used in the Julian Calendar. Consequently, over the centuries the calendar began to gain on nature. In 1545 the vernal equinox was noted as March 11th whereas at Nicaea in 325 it had been chronicled as March 21st; thus over a period of 1220 years the calendar had advanced ten days. On the instigation of Aluise Lilio from Verona and others, Pope Gregory VIII ordained in 1582 that October 5th should be re-dated the 15th, and that the last year of every century should not be a leap year unless divisible by 400.
This new-style Gregorian Calendar was soon adopted by the mid-European Catholic countries but was resisted by the Protestant and Eastern Orthodox countries. It was 170 years before Britain and her colonies, then including America, acceded, by which time the discrepancy had increased to eleven days with the addition of a leap year day in 1700. This variance was rectified by the Earl of Chesterfield's Parliamentary Act of 1752 which re-dated September 3rd the 14th, and moved New Year to January 1st. The change played havoc with the payment of wages, rents and taxes and people complained that they would lose eleven days out of the year when they came to pay their dues and demands on March 21st. This was the beginning of the Civil or Legal year (Lady Day, the Feast of the Annunciation) when rents and taxes were normally settled; the Board of Stamps and Taxes simply resolved the problem by advancing the end of the tax year to April 5th where it has remained ever since. The reform also 're-dated' previous deeds and documents executed before March 25th, and these have since been identified with bridging dates, eg 1750/51.
The rest of the world gradually came into line, with Turkey ultimately adopting the Gregorian Calendar in 1926. The lengthy period of conversion, however, created one or two international anomalies. For instance, British and Spanish Admiralty records of the Armada's movements in 1588 were ten days adrift; the Russians, who only adopted the calendar in 1918, arrived twelve days too late for the 1908 Olympic Games in London; and the `October Revolution` of the Bolsheviks in 1917 was actually in their November.
(This article is an extract from`Turton through the Ages` published in 2000 by Turton Local History Society and can be obtained from Mrs Jean Gerrard.
Tel {01204) 308322.
