Calendar (New Style) Act 1750

A memorial plaque.[lower-alpha 4] The date of death is given as 28 January 170+8/9

Since 1155, the legal New Year's Day in England had been 25 March.[12] The introduction to the Act states succinctly the rationale for a change to the start of the year in England (and Wales) to 1 January.[13] The March date had been found to have many inconveniences. It differed from the date (1 January) used by Scotland, other neighbouring countries, and by ordinary people throughout the kingdom.[lower-alpha 5] As a consequence, mistakes were frequently made in the dates of deeds and other writings.[lower-alpha 6]

In his biographies of the Caesars, Suetonius wrote the Julian calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar in AUC 709 (45 BC), continued the old Roman practice of beginning the year with January.[14] Later Christians felt 1 January had no religious significance and wanted to begin the year on a more appropriate date.[15] No civil legislation or religious canon law ordered this change, but Christmas Day, 25 December, gradually became popular in England from the 6th century.[16] In 1067, New Year's Day reverted to 1 January, but in 1155 it was changed to 25 March,[lower-alpha 7] where it remained until changed by this Act.[12] It is the continuation of the Roman calendar layout beginning with January that eventually led European countries in the 16th century to return to a year start on 1 January. Examples include the Venetian Republic (1522), France (1564, nearly 20 years before the Gregorian reform) and Scotland (1600).[17] By 1750 most of Europe had made this change and the continuing English practice became a source of confusion for English merchants and diplomats and their counterparts, when dealing across the Channel or with Scotland.

An informal system of 'dual dating' had developed to help reduce confusion.[lower-alpha 8] For example, a date written as 21 January 1719/20 (or 17+19/20) means both a date of 21 January 1719 (where the year began ten months earlier, on 25 March 1719, as in England) and a date of 21 January 1720 (where the year began three weeks earlier, on 1 January 1720, as in Scotland). These notations both refer to the same day in the real world.

The Calendar (New Style) Act 1750 removed this difficulty by changing the start of the year to 1 January for England and Wales and the colonies.[lower-alpha 9] The change applied "after the last day of December 1751".[19][lower-alpha 10] The legal year which began on 25 March 1751 became a short year of 282 days, running from 25 March 1751 to 31 December 1751. The following year began as 1 January 1752 (New Style).

First page of the papal bull Inter gravissimas ("Among the most serious ...")

The reason given to discard both the traditional calendar and the eleven-day accumulated difference was a religious one: calculation of the date of Easter. The introduction to the Act explains that, due to the inaccuracy in the Julian calendar, the date of the spring equinox (which determines the date of Easter) had drifted by about eleven days from its date at the time of the First Council of Nicaea, 21 March,[lower-alpha 11] and that this drift would continue unless the calendar was corrected and the eleven days' difference deleted.

The Gregorian calendar was a reform of the Julian calendar, instituted by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 by the papal bull "Inter gravissimas" ("Among the most serious"). The intention expressed by the text of this bull was to reset the calendar so that celestial events critical for the calculation of Easter dates—the March equinox and its adjacent full moons—would be back in what the bull calls "their proper places" and would be prevented from being moved away again. The divergence had happened because the Julian calendar adds a leap year every four years, but this process adds about three more days every four hundred years than the earth's orbit requires. By 1582, the error had accumulated to the extent that the calendar date of the spring equinox had moved from 21 March by about ten days.[lower-alpha 12]

Gregory's reform removed ten days from the Julian calendar, thus resetting 21 March to coincide with the equinox.[20] The reform also provided a new method for calculating leap years so that the error would not recur. Under the Julian calendar a leap year fell every four years when the year was divisible exactly by four. The second part of Gregory's change declared that a centennial year would not be a leap year unless it was further divisible exactly by 400: Section II of the Act replicates this algorithm. By 1750, almost all countries in Western Christendom except Britain and its empire had adopted Gregory's reform.[21]

According to Gregory's rule, the year 1600 was a leap year, but 1700 was not—but it remained a leap year under the Julian calendar. This meant that when Britain reformed the calendar in the 1750s, the divergence between the calendars had reached eleven days. Section I of the Act corrects this divergence by providing that Wednesday, 2 September 1752 be followed by Thursday, 14 September 1752.

The Annex to the Act gives the algorithm (formally, 'the Computus') to be used thereafter in the Church of England's Book of Common Prayer to establish the date of Easter: this replaced the previous rules used by the Church. However, with the potential for religious strife in mind, the promoters of the Bill downplayed the Roman Catholic connection. The Parliamentary drafters of the Act, and of the associated text to revise the Book of Common Prayer, were careful to minimise the impact on religious sensitivities by expressing the revision in terms consistent with the traditional method of the Church of England.[22] They had reason to be cautious: the Government of Elizabeth I had first attempted to reform the calendar in 1583/1584, but the Anglican hierarchy of the day rejected the proposal because of its Popish origins.[23] Again, when Sir Isaac Newton renewed the campaign to correct the calendar in 1699, his proposal foundered on doctrinal objections.[24] The Annex established a computation for the date of Easter that achieved the same result as Gregory's rules, without actually referring to him.[4] The algorithm, set out in the Book of Common Prayer as required by the Act, includes calculation of the Golden Number and the Sunday Letter needed for the Anglican method. The Annex includes the definition: "Easter-day (on which the rest depend) is always the first Sunday after the Full Moon, which happens upon, or next after the Twenty-first Day of March. And if the Full Moon happens upon a Sunday, Easter-day is the Sunday after".[3] The Annex uses the terms 'Paschal Full Moon' and 'Ecclesiastical Full Moon', making it clear that they only approximate to the real full moon.[25]

In his The Book of Almanacs (1851) Augustus de Morgan (Professor of Mathematics at University College, London), commented on the definition of Easter in the Calendar (New Style) Act 1750. He noted that the body of the Act wrongly stated the way Easter was calculated, but that the annexed Tables correctly set out the dates for Easter as prescribed by Pope Gregory.[26]

Until the 1662 edition of the Book of Common Prayer, England followed the practice of the early Julian calendar period of creating a leap day by having two successive days numbered 24 February.[27] The Book of Common Prayer (1662) included a calendar which used entirely consecutive day counting and showed leap day as falling on 29 February.[11]

Section II of the Calendar (New Style) Act contains the new Gregorian rule for determining leap years in the future and also makes it quite clear that leap years contain 366 days.[lower-alpha 13] In addition, the calendar at the end of this Act confirms that leap day falls on 29 February.[7]

The formal title of the Act is: An act for regulating the commencement of the year; and for correcting the calendar now in use.[1]

It was not the practice in the 18th century to give brief titles to Acts of Parliament, now known as their 'Short Titles'. The old long titles had proved increasingly inconvenient,[lower-alpha 15] and it later became the custom to give acts informal short titles. The Short Titles Act 1896 regularised this and retrospectively gave short titles to old statutes that were still live.[38] In particular, the 1896 Act conferred the short title Calendar (New Style) Act 1750 on this Act.

It may seem strange to modern readers that the Calendar (New Style) Act has the date of 1750 when Royal Assent was given on 22 May 1751. The reason is that, before the Acts of Parliament (Commencement) Act 1793, the date on which a Bill became law was the first day of the Parliamentary Session in which they passed, unless the Act contained a provision to the contrary.[39]

The calendar reform bill was introduced in the session which began on 17 January 1750 Old Style [N.S. 28 January 1751], almost nine months into a year that had begun on 23 March 1750. Hence the Short Titles Act 1896 assigned the calendar reform to 1750.

After the conquest of Wales by Edward I of England, English law was increasingly applied. Various acts passed by the Parliament of England between 1535 and 1542 consolidated the combination of England and Wales as a single jurisdiction. Nevertheless, before the Wales and Berwick Act 1746, it was often uncertain whether a reference to 'England' in legislation of the London Parliament included Wales. The 1746 Act provided that in all legislation, past and future,[lower-alpha 16] the word 'England' was deemed to include Wales and thus the Calendar Act applied to Wales, despite it not being named explicitly.

Scotland had already made part of the change: its calendar year had begun on 1 January since 1600.[41] Thus, in Scotland, the day after 31 December 1599 became 1 January 1600 instead of 1 January 1599, as it otherwise would have done for a year which began on 25 March 1599. The example of Continental countries prompted King James VI of Scotland and his council to make the change, as the Register of the Scottish Privy Council of 17 December 1599 records.[42]

The remainder of the Calendar (New Style) Act 1750 applied equally to Scotland, a part of the Kingdom of Great Britain since the Acts of Union 1707.

At the time, the Kingdom of Ireland was a semi-autonomous kingdom in a personal union with the Kingdom of Great Britain. The Declaratory Act 1719 asserted that the Parliament of Great Britain had the right to legislate for Ireland, which was one of His Majesty's Dominions. Nevertheless, in 1782, the Parliament of Ireland enacted a statute to confirm the application of the 1750 Act to Ireland.[43] Whatever the de jure status of the British Act in Ireland, it was applied immediately de facto, as recorded in the ready reckoner printed in Faulkner's Dublin Journal for 1752.[44]

In January 1753, the Tynwald, the Isle of Man's legislature, passed an Act for regulating the Commencement of the Year, and for establishing the new Calendar now used in England,[45] now referred to as the Gregorian Calendar Act 1753.[46][47] The Act recited the Island had observed the calendar established by the British Act since 1 January 1752 and made provision in similar terms to the British Act. The Act was promulgated and became law, with retrospective effect, on 5 July 1753. One of its permanent effects was to postpone the holding of the annual sitting of Tynwald at St John's, at which Acts of Tynwald were and still are promulgated, from 24 June (the feast of St John the Baptist) to 5 July.[47]^{:section 11}

The Calendar (New Style) Act 1750 applied to Britain's American colonies: the north-eastern states of the present day United States and part of Canada.[48] Some British law, including the 1750 Act, is still applicable in some US states because when American independence was declared in 1776, it was not practical for these former colonies to create an entirely new body of American law to replace British law. The practical solution adopted was to continue to apply British law as it stood in 1776 but subject to the proviso that it could be overridden by any subsequent provision of American law,[49] and did not conflict with the Constitution and laws of the United States.[50] Some States later passed brief calendar measures but others left this and other old British acts in place.

James Bryan Whitfield, a former Florida Supreme Court judge, together with others, produced a comprehensive list of the relevant measures in 1941.[51] This built on earlier work by Missouri. The list includes the key part of the Calendar (New Style) Act 1750.

Some states adopted as their common law the laws of England as it was in 1607, predating the 1750 Act.[52]

There is no US federal calendar law.[53]

The Act remains directly in force in Canada as part of Canadian law.[54][55]

The Calendar (New Style) Act 1750 applies directly or indirectly in other former British colonies.

Early Australian colonial legislation applied British law.[56] Subsequently, various reviews have considered the relevance of old British statutes. Australian States eventually repealed British statutes but re-enacted those which remained relevant, such as the Calendar (New Style) Act 1750. For example, New South Wales passed the Imperial Acts Application Act 1969, the First Schedule of which repeals various British statutes including the Calendar (New Style) Act 1750.[57] At the same time Section 16 continues the operation of the British Calendar Act by restating key parts and by referring to that Act for the details.[58] Other Australian States passed similar measures.

New Zealand also passed early legislation at various times applying British law.[59][60] In 1988, New Zealand enacted the Imperial Laws Application Act 1988, which disapplied all but a limited schedule of English Acts it declared to be "part of the laws of New Zealand", one of which is the Calendar (New Style) Act 1750.[61]

Britain had by this time begun colonising India and parts of Africa—hence the references to Asia and Africa.

Apart from Great Britain and Ireland, the only part of Europe under effective British sovereignty was Gibraltar. However, each session of Parliament began with a recital that the King was also the rightful King of France.[62][lower-alpha 18]

An Election Entertainment (c. 1755), a painting by William Hogarth, which is the main source for "Give us our Eleven Days".

Some history books report rioting in reaction to the calendar change, with people demanding that their 'eleven days' be returned. However, this is very likely a myth, based on just two primary sources—The World, a satirical journal of Lord Chesterfield, and An Election Entertainment, a painting by the satirist William Hogarth.[63] There are no contemporary records of any such events in the riot depositions at the Public Record Office.[64][65]

This is the same Lord Chesterfield who introduced the Bill to the House of Lords. He wrote to his son, "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."[30] There is no record of which 'numerous assembly' he had in mind.

When the son of the Earl of Macclesfield (who had been influential in passing the Act) stood for Parliament in Oxfordshire as a Whig in 1754, dissatisfaction with the calendar reform was one of a number of issues raised by his Tory opponents. In 1755, Hogarth produced a painting (and an engraved print from the painting) loosely based on these elections, entitled An Election Entertainment, which shows a placard carrying the slogan "Give us our Eleven Days" (on the floor, lower right). In his book Hogarth, His Life, Art and Times (1993), Ronald Paulson says of the picture 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"[66] but does not provide any supporting evidence for either of these 'riots'.

Thus, the 'calendar riot' fiction was born. The election campaign depicted concluded in 1754, after a very lengthy contest between Court Whigs and Jacobite Tories. 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 favouritism towards foreign Jews and the 'Popish' calendar. Hogarth's placard, part of a satire on the character of the debate, was not an observation of actual crowd behaviour.[67]

There were, however, legitimate concerns lest tax and other payments arise any earlier under the new calendar than they would otherwise have done. Consequently, Provision 6 of the Act ('Times of Payment of Rents, Annuities') stipulated that monthly, quarterly or yearly payments would not become due until the days that originally they would have done had the Julian calendar continued.[70] That is, due dates were deferred by eleven days.

The Earl of Macclesfield, in his speech to the House of Lords during the passage of the Bill, said a proportionate reduction in payments had been considered as an alternative solution. That is, maintaining the original payment dates but reducing the amounts due proportionately to reflect the omission of eleven days from the quarter ending on 29 September 1752 (Michaelmas Day). Macclesfield said this idea was abandoned because it would prove more complex than it first appeared.[71] Despite this, the Treasury later considered legislating to over-ride the Calendar (New Style) Act 1750 provisions by applying proportionate reductions to government payments of interest, salaries and wages, but the idea was abandoned.[71] Nevertheless, the Treasury realised that outside government a proportionate reduction of wages, rents etc. for the short quarter might be convenient in some cases. Dr Robert Poole writes that the Treasury, "decided that a tidy move to new-style quarter day payments might gradually be achieved at the point where old leases expired and new ones began. Tables of abatements ... for the eleven missing days were included in the official information about the changeover and widely published in the press, almanacs and pocket books".[71] For example, The True Briton newspaper of 20 September 1752 reported that the reduction was 7d for each pound or, more precisely, ​7 ¹⁄₄d.[72][lower-alpha 20]

As already observed, the authors of the Act were careful to minimise the impact on religious sensitivities by expressing the revision in terms consistent with the traditions of the established Church of England, given the experience of previous attempts. By the middle of the 18th Century, however, it seems that the climate had changed somewhat. The traditional saints' days like Lady Day, Michaelmas and Martinmas had come to mark events in the civil calendar such as fair days, rent days and hiring days far more than they did days of special religious observance. Poole writes, "The religious calendar of the established church continued, but it encompassed a shrinking proportion of the population as Dissent expanded at the expense of Anglicanism, and as parish wakes, feasts and saints' days were themselves disowned by many parish clergy."[73] So the Act explicitly exempted fairs and marts from the calendar reform; "that is, they were to change their nominal date to retain the same place in the season, thus in effect observing the Old Style".[74]

The revision to the Book of Common Prayer setting the new basis for calculating the date for Easter (and its associated events like Lent) appears to have passed without public controversy—"perhaps", Poole remarks, "because few people understood how Easter worked anyway".[22] The date of Christmas, however, proved to be a different matter. The Gentleman's Magazine and Historical Chronicle, 23 January 1753, reported that a "vast concourse of people" in Somerset gathered at the (Christmas-flowering) Glastonbury thorn on 24 December 1752 (New Style) to test the authenticity of the new date. "[B]ut to their great disappointment, there was no appearance of its blowing, which made them watch it narrowly the 5th of Jan. the Christmas-Day, Old-Stile, when it blow'd as usual."[75] The vicar of Glastonbury, however, later announced that it had in fact flowered nearer New Christmas Day.[75] William Dawson (1902) writes a Reverend Francis Blackburne opened his church on Friday, 5 January 1753—(O.S., 25 December 1752)—to a congregation which filled the building. "The people were sorely disappointed, however, when the rector did not use the service designated for Christmas Day but instead, like a crusading clergyman of the twentieth century, preached a sermon on the virtue of obeying the Calendar Act."[76]

The Calendar Act 1751 (25 Geo II c.30) was needed to rectify some unforeseen consequences of the Calendar (New Style) Act 1750.[77]

Section I of the 1751 Act concerned the legal validity of actions that were due to be executed on the omitted eleven days, 3 September to 13 September 1752. The Act provided that for 1752 only, those actions would be deemed to be lawful and to have effect on "the same natural days" as if the reform had not taken place.

Section II addressed calendar dates associated with the opening of common land, the payment of rents, and other matters. Such legal acts as were governed by the dates of movable feasts would thenceforth conform to the dates of those feasts in the revised calendar.

Section III provided that nothing should abridge, extend, or alter the titles of land.

Section IV resolved the date for electing the Mayor of the City of London and also revised an unrelated Act (24 Geo II c.48) that had shortened the Michaelmas term.

The 1751 Act also addressed the effect of the revised calendar on the fishing season, extending it to account for what would otherwise have meant the loss of the best part of the herring catch.

A similar issue was identified shortly afterwards with the date of the "annual election of mayor, sheriffs, treasurers, coroners, and leave-lookers" in Chester "to avoid the inconvenience which would arise to the citizens, from the alteration of the style bringing the ancient day of election into the fair week." The issue was resolved by appending a clause to an otherwise irrelevant Act, (25 Geo II c.31,[lower-alpha 21] concerning distemper in cattle) to move its statutory date forward by a week.[79]

Section III of the Calendar (New Style) Act 1750 required the observation of certain days of political or religious significance. These are listed in a Table headed "Certain Solemn Days for which particular [church] Services are appointed" and are: 5 November (the Gunpowder Plot); 30 January (Execution of Charles I); and 29 May (The Restoration).

As part of the development of religious and political toleration, Section I of the Anniversary Days Observance Act 1859 removed from various acts, including the Calendar Act, the obligation to commemorate these days with special church services.

The Easter Act 1928 provided for the possibility of permanently fixing the date of Easter as the first Sunday after the second Saturday in April. An Order in Council was needed to trigger the change and no such order was made. If invoked, the 1928 Act would have replaced the table of "Moveable and Immoveable Feasts" in the Calendar (New Style) Act 1750. This Act never came into force and the table was not changed.

The Statute Law Revision Act 1948 simplified and removed some redundant words from Section VI of the Calendar (New Style) Act 1750, including the reference to the time at which the age of 21, or any other age, is reached. The provision about age could only affect those alive at the time of calendar reform. The 1948 Act also repealed the "Table to find Easter till the Year 1899 inclusive" and the "Table of the Moveable Feasts for Fifty two years". By 1948 these tables had ceased to be relevant and this Act deleted them.[80]

The calendar included in the Calendar (New Style) Act 1750 is headed "The Calendar, with the Table of Lessons". For each month the morning and evening prayers are specified. The Statute Law (Repeals) Act 1971 removed the words "with the Table of Lessons" and also all the specified prayers in the Table. The changes followed a Law Commission Report and reflected the views of the Church.

Section IV of the Calendar (New Style) Act 1750 has provisions about the dates for meetings of courts in Scotland. These were repealed by the Statute Law (Repeals) Act 1986.