On March 25, many of us would have been getting ready to ring in the New Year – if we were living in the Middle Ages. Back then, confusion reigned as to when one year turned into the next, thanks to two competing calendar systems.
The first was based on the pagan calendar, which is the one more familiar to us these days. Thus, for the builders of Stonehenge the New Year began around the time of the winter solstice, when the day at last begins to lengthen. That date is January 1, making that month the first one and December the twelfth. The Romans adopted this system for their own uses, with Julius Caesar ruling that January 1 was the official start of the year as part of a thorough revision to make the “Julian Calendar” a solar one with 365-odd days.
Then there was the Christian ecclesiastical year, which began on March 25. This was the day upon which the Earth was supposedly created, according to chronologists of the time, but its popularity grew in tandem with the cult of the Virgin Mary, when it became known as “Lady day.” Why March 25? It was the Annunciation (when an angel revealed to Mary that she would conceive the Son of God), calculated as being exactly nine months between then and Christmas Day, celebrated as being the birth of Jesus. (Similarly, there were nine months between the Virgin’s own Conception on December 8 and her Nativity on September 8.)
Owing to the power of the Church in civil matters, this ecclesiastical dating became integrated within the government, legal, and financial calendar. Even so, there remained a folkloric fondness for the January 1 marker — which felt somehow more “natural” — and even clerics found themselves defying Vatican directives by numbering Sundays according to popular almanacs, which invariably drew on Roman law, itself still based on Caesar’s favoring of January 1.
The upshot was that by the middle of the thirteenth century, January 1 – despite its dubious pagan background – had again become regarded as the unofficial beginning of the year. For the next couple of centuries, it is very difficult to find any mention in the archives or in literature of any date but January 1 as being New Year’s Day. Indeed, even sovereigns began to accept January 1 as the day on which they distributed and received gifts to and from their subjects.
The key switchover might well have occurred in 1531. On March 25 of that year, an entry in King Henry VIII’s ledger records that bonuses were “paid to the pages of the king’s chamber in rewarde for newe yeres daye.” The following year, they were paid on January 9.
Nevertheless, March 25 lived on. While few continued to call it “New Year’s Day,” it was general practice to not change the year until March 25. So, while one grandee could write to another on January 1, 1605, that he is “bold to observe this compliment of fashionable custom, and present your Honour this New Year’s Day with an ambling gelding,” he would not say it was 1606 until March 25. If you look at older editions of Samuel Pepys’s Diary, Oliver Cromwell’s letters, and John Evelyn’s Diary, you’ll find that they too followed this rather illogical and confusing custom.
It would not be until 1752 that Britain at last standardized these two calendars in an Act declaring “that in and throughout all his Majesty’s Dominions and Countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, belonging or subject to the Crown of Great Britain, the said Supputation, according to which the Year of our Lord beginneth on the 25th Day of March, shall not be made use of from and after the last Day of December 1751; and that the first Day of January next following the said last Day of December shall be reckoned, taken, deemed and accounted to be the first Day of the Year of our Lord 1752.”
Still, I think there’s a lot to be said for returning to an official March 25 New Year. The weather’s always much more clement than on January 1 and there’s no need for bulky coats, earmuffs, and snowboots when heading out to to sing Auld Lang Syne and watching the ball drop in Times Square. I don’t seriously hold out much hope that this will ever happen, but you have to agree that it would be a most pleasant way of heralding the arrival of spring.
Alexander Rose is the author of American Rifle: A Biography and Washington’s Spies: The Story of America’s First Spy Ring. His website is www.alexrose.com.
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