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

Past & Present, Nov, 1995 by Robert Poole

It can be asserted with confidence that the calendar riots are a myth. In fact, the truth about "the legendary English time riots" was sniffed out some time ago by Paul Alkon, in the course of an essay arguing for a sophisticated time-awareness amongst the educated classes of eighteenth-century England.(34) It is more difficult to say where the riot myth came from, except that it seems to have developed, by accretion as it was turned to different purposes. The weak eighteenth-century version of the myth, with "clamour" and "superstition" rather than actual rioting, emphasized the enlightened character of the measure by contrasting it with the ignorance and superstition of its opponents; in time, Hogarth's slogan made a natural addition to this tale.(35) It may be that the strong version of the myth, with real riots, was first aired by the barrister Scarlett, for whom sight of Hogarth's picture suggested a rhetorical opportunity to help damn the Peterloo defendants.(36) In the mid-nineteenth century, the Protestant mathematical writer Geoffrey de Morgan identified anti-popish sentiment as the cause of the riots, adding the picturesque detail that "the mob pursued the minister in his carriage, clamouring for the [eleven] days". This version probably gained its currency in the scientific world through being repeated in C. R. Weld's History of the Royal Society a few years later.(37) The still wider popularity of the story may well, as Alkon suggests, be traceable to its inclusion in W. E. H. Lecky's much-reprinted History of England in the Eighteenth Century, first published in 1878. Lecky, however, may simply have been adding a rationalist gloss to a passage in an earlier work by Lord Mahon, a descendant of Chesterfield, for whom the episode illustrated the absurdity of anti-popery.(38) It is interesting to note that the strong version of the riot myth emerged at around the same time as another Protestant myth, characterized by Jeffrey Burton Russell as "the story of Christopher Columbus, the bold young rationalist who overcame ignorant and intractable churchmen and superstitious sailors" to prove that the earth was round.(39) Clearly, what is most interesting about the tales of calendar mobs is not what they show about the plebeians, but what they reveal of the attitudes of their educated authors and readers to the calendar issue.

To understand what really happened in the eighteenth century, four questions can be posed. First, how did thinking about calendar reform develop from rejection in 1583 to acceptance in 1752? Secondly, what did the calendar reform actually aim to do? Thirdly, what effect did the reform have on society? And fourthly, how much opposition did it generate?

II

First, then, how did thinking about the calendar change to enable the reform of 1752 to take place? The calendar is a complicated construction with a complex history, but an outline of the main lines of debate over the previous two centuries will be helpful.

The Gregorian calendar which England belatedly adopted in 1752 was in essence that promulgated in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII. Issued as a papal bull carrying out part of the programme of the Council of Trent, the Gregorian reform has been described as "an act of the Counter-Reformation". Owen Chadwick makes the same point: "The successful introduction of the Gregorian calendar", he writes, ". . . is one test of the progress of the Counter-Reformation".(40) The whole Christian church had adopted the Julian calendar at the Council of Nicaea in 325, as part of a project to fix a common date for Easter (an unfathomable issue which had long caused contention and even schism). The Julian calendar, however, was eleven minutes a year too long, and by the sixteenth century the error had accumulated to ten days. Compounded by lunar discrepancies, this meant that the Easter of the church often failed to correspond with that indicated by the heavens. The Gregorian reform removed the unbidden ten days from October 1582 to bring the calendar back into the same relationship with the heavens which it had borne in 325, and introduced a modified pattern of leap years to keep it there, as well as a new method of calculating the date of Easter (which remained the chief concern). Most Protestant states ignored the reform; even the Catholic ones for the most part adopted it at dates of their own choosing, and by civil decree.