'Give us our eleven days!': calendar reform in eighteenth-century England

Past & Present, Nov, 1995 by Robert Poole

For generations, there has been no better illustration of the collective idiocy of the crowd than the story of the English calendar riots of 1752. At the trial of Henry Hunt and others for treason in 1820, James Scarlett, the prosecuting counsel, had this to say:

The ridiculous folly of a mob had been exemplified in a most humorous manner by that eminent painter, Mr. Hogarth. It was found necessary many years ago, in order to prevent a confusion in the reckoning of time, to knock eleven days out of the calendar, and it was supposed by ignorant persons that the legislature had actually deprived them of eleven days of their existence. This ridiculous idea was finely exposed in Mr. Hogarth's picture, where the mob were painted throwing up their hats, and crying out "Give us back our eleven days". Thus it was at the present time; that many individuals, who could not distinguish words from things, were making an outcry for that of which they could not well explain the nature.(1)

Curiously enough, the extensive literature on eighteenth-century riot has yielded not one study of this most famous of episodes. Furthermore, amidst much debate about time-awareness in the same period, the calendar has received little direct attention. This article aims to address both these areas.

Time was one of the contested terrains of the eighteenth century. The techniques of measuring it were becoming ever more sophisticated, the practice of measuring it was growing ever more widespread, and the means of measuring it, in the form of clocks and pocket-watches, ever more widely owned.(2) Progress, regulation, regularity: this was the age of the pendulum. By 1800, it has been claimed, even the crowds were observing regular hours.(3) E. P. Thompson has shown how widespread were conflicts over time and work-discipline in the eighteenth century, and sees this as part of a clash between two different types of social consciousness, the one time-aware, the other not: "Recorded time (one suspects) belonged in the mid-century still to the gentry, the masters, the farmers and the tradesmen".(4) The common people did, however, have their own measure of recorded time: the calendar.

Amongst the reform of measurement proposed during the Enlightenment, that of the calendar was the first to be carried through in England. Mid-eighteenth-century England was still more a society of the almanac than of the clock.(5) The reform of clock time, when Greenwich mean time became the national standard, had to await the unifying effect of the railway; in the late eighteenth century, stage-coaches travelling east and west observed local time, practising the strange, relativistic exercise of carrying with them clocks set to gain or lose in conformity with the migrating sun.(6) Weights and measures were reformed somewhat earlier, but despite much debate it was the late eighteenth century before any real start was made.(7) The calendar, however, was reformed as early as 1752, in an act of some complexity which brought British dating in line with that used on the Continent. This content of the reform is less well understood than it might be.

Calendar customs have received attention from a variety of directions in recent years. Reinterpretations of the Reformation have brought out the extent of the cultural losses sustained when the old ritual calendar was overturned, with popular resistance to Puritanism being centred around the attempt to preserve elements of the old festive culture within what Christopher Haigh has termed "parish Anglicanism".(8) "The fall of merry England", in Ronald Hutton's account, was roughly coterminous with that of the Stuart dynasty.(9) Society no longer ran according to a common public calendar encompassing religious, social, festive and agricultural activities; rather, there were many calendars. Each major town or city had its own civic calendar of public holidays, feasts, fasts, guilds, processions, elections, fairs and anniversaries, differentiated from both agricultural and liturgical calendars.(10) 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.(11) The Protestant national calendar of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had been based on a potent and unstable mixture of royalism and anti-popery; its eighteenth-century successor was attuned to the political requirements of the Hanoverian regime, marked by royal anniversaries and military commemorations.(12) Hutton's "fall of merry England" coincides with the rise of E. P. Thompson's "rebellious traditional culture", a popular culture marked by traditionalism but also largely independent of the patronage of church and gentry. The calendar of popular customs and festivals became increasingly the common property of the labouring classes, and increasingly also a matter of local custom, rooted in a plebeian way of life that was under attack from moralists, employers and agricultural improvers.(13) The seasonal cycles into which this calendar was woven have been used by historians of the rural economy as a way of analysing patterns of seasonal employment and of marriage, of the sexual division of labour and the spread of industry.(14)