In Our Time - The Calendar

Episode Date: December 19, 2002

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the calendar, which shapes the lives of millions of people. It is an invention that gives meaning to the passing of time and orders our daily existence. It links us to the arcane movements of the heavens and the natural rhythms of the earth. It is both deeply practical and profoundly sacred. But where does this strange and complex creation come from? Why does the week last seven days but the year twelve months? Who named these concepts and through them shaped our lives so absolutely? The answers involve Babylonian Astronomers and Hebrew Theologians, Roman Emperors and Catholic Popes. If the calendar is a house built on the shifting sands of time, it has had many architects. With Robert Poole, Reader in History at St Martin’s College Lancaster and author of Time’s Alteration, Calendar Reform in Early Modern England; Kristen Lippincott, Deputy Director of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich; Peter Watson, Research Associate at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at Cambridge University and author of A Terrible Beauty – A History of the People and Ideas that Shaped the Modern Mind.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, the calendar shapes the lives of millions of people. It's an invention that gives meaning to the passing of time that orders our daily existence.

It links us to the arcane movements of the heavens and the natural rhythms of the earth. It's both deeply practical and profoundly sacred. But where does this strange and complex creation come from? Why does the week last seven days, but the year 12 months? Who named these concepts and through them shaped our lives? The answers involve Babylonian astronomers and Hebrew theologians, Roman emperors and English scholars.

Isaac Newton, for instance, designed a calendar said to be mathematically flawless, but no one can understand it. Gregory the 13th seems to have got it right. With me to discuss the calendar are Robert Poole, reader in history at St. Martin Scottish Lancaster and author of Times Alteration, calendar reform in early modern England. Kristen Lippincott,

deputy director of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, and Peter Watson, Research Associate at the MacDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at Cambridge University, and author of a terrible beauty, a history of the people and ideas that shaped the modern mind. Kristen Lippincott, what were the first calendars based on?

Well, the best way to think about the calendar is to put yourself back in the shoes of ancient man and you're sitting there in the middle of some field watching the daily rhythms. And the first rhythm that you really notice, either than beyond day and night, is the waxing and waning of the moon. And you notice that every 28 days you've got a full moon back. And almost all of the early calendars are lunar calendars. In fact, we have lunar calendars dating back to 10,000 BC. The next big cycle that you notice is a cycle of the year. And the first one is usually, by the stars. When certain bright stars appear on the horizon, it marks the beginning of a new year.

And then the third thing, really, that you notice is that the sun is in the same place in the sky after 365 days. So that's the three basic kinds of calendars that you can have. A lunar calendar, a ciderial or star calendar, or a solar calendar, a sun calendar. Would these seem to be very useful for the, just for a diurnal existence? from the very beginning? Well, certainly we find that most early calendars and most religious calendars are lunar-based because it's something seeing the moon every night waxing and waning

is something that is ingrained very much in people's souls, if you like. Those of us who live in cities now don't really notice it. You can imagine before electric lights, whether or not it was a full moon, really mattered to people's lives. And so we find that most the early religious calendars are lunar, and are really very deeply ingrained. Beyond this, of course, the stars and the sun mark the seasons. So they tell you when to plant, when to reap, when to sow,

and also things like navigation were based on calendars. There's a passage in, I think, in Homer, where it says, don't set sail unless the Pleiades are rising on the horizon with the sun. And then this Hesiot talks about farming and agriculture that are got to. Well, all of works and days is saying, when the slug climbs the tree, that's the time when Orion is rising. And it really gives you a very good calendar that still works today. And actually that kind of country law, fun enough, when the slug climbs a tree,

lingered on in this country, in country areas until quite recently. Well, certainly, the farmer's almanac, which you can still buy, not at any newsstand, but quite, is available, tells you that kind of folklore, which is true. It's based on observation. Peter Watson, as I understand it, the first sophisticated calendars developed were developed by the Babylonians who were mathematicians and astronomers. Could you tell us about that calendar? Well, as Kristen says, they noticed, like it, you don't have to be a great astronomer, I think, to notice that there are 12 lunations, 12 months in a year, more or less.

They had their 12 months, and then they had an extra period. This has happened all over the world, a sort of 13th month of varying lengths, generally, really. regarded as unlucky. But it was the Babylonians who devised the system based on 60, 60 being the lowest common multiple of 12 and 30, or roughly the number of days in a month. And the Babylonians, therefore, gave us minutes and seconds, as well as weeks and years and days.

And they have this system. And it's to them, and the... Latinization of this, that they had a system based on 60, just as the decimal system, or equivalent to the decimal system based on 10. And the first division of this was called Pas Minutai Prima, Latin, the first small division. And that phrase became corrupted to minute. And the second division was Parthes Minucii Seconde. And that phrase in time became corrupted to second. And so that's how we get, firstly minutes and secondly seconds. And then they also noticed that as the sun rises, it passes through the stars.

And this idea comes down to us via the Greeks as the zodiac. The Greek word zodion, meaning little animal. And some of the stars in the sky were shaped, or the Babylonian sort, they look like animals. And so this is how we arrive at both the zodiac and the fact that a circle around a point, we now divide into 360 degrees. It's all related to the same system. I could imagine why they base the system on 30, because that being approximately the number of days in approximately lunar months. I don't know quite where the 60 comes from, and yet 60 in the number 6 seems very important to the Babylonians. Yes, well, I think that it's a mathematical thing, that 60 is the low.

most common multiple of both 30 and 12. They both divide into it. So it was a flexible way of dividing it up. And what did they do with the days that were left over then? Well, that was called an intercalated month and this was regarded, not just in Babylon, I have to say, but in other early cultures around the world as very bad luck. And you're very careful about what you did on those days and some cultures don't even give this period a name. So to name it was make it even worse black. Would you consider this to be a great legacy that the Babylonians passed on? Was this brought together for the first time in an extensive and coherent form by them?

Well, I think that, yes. I mean, the smaller parts of the Canada are the Babylonian legacy. As I say, everybody could notice a year and the months. And for instance, the Babylonians regarded the seventh day, the 14th day, the 21st day, and the 28th day, as unlucky. and there were various taboos on what you could do in those days. And there you see the beginning of the week. They also regarded the 20th day as very lucky because the 20th day of any one month

was the 49th day of the previous month. And that 7 times 7 was regarded as lucky. And the full moon day was known as a Shubotum. I think I've got that right. Which is when the Jews then went into exile in Babylon, they appropriate this word. as the Shabbat, the Sabbath, the day on which you don't really do any work. And so that has come down to us from the Babylonians.

And we still have the word and the concept of the Sabbath. Who took on, who did they pass on this calendar to? Who, as it were, took it to the next stage? Well, I think both the Greeks took on a lot of it, and in time the Romans. And the Romans took on eventually through the Julian reforms, many of the things. But the astrological influence that the Babylonians seem to have started around about 500 BC

has come down to us in the astrological week that we still essentially use. Can you give us some idea about the... You mentioned the Roman, how the early Roman calendar worked? Well, the early Romans, according to legend, the first king of Rome, Romulus, they had a 10-month calendar. Why was that? Which began in March. And there again, to begin with,

they seem not to have had any words for what we now call January in February. And this may answer, you know, people may have wondered why September, which is the ninth month, is based on a word that means seven. And this actually is because originally

the year started after the spring equinox in March. So they just didn't bother with those. Not to begin with. No. You weren't going to even. They didn't count. No.

Then later on, the second king of Rome, I think it was, introduced February and January. And to begin with, February came before January. And later still, this was changed, and January started the year. But they also had, the same as the Babylonians, this overlap period, this intercalated month, 13th month, which they call mercedonius, which is our word mercenary from the Latin mercies, meaning wages, because this is when a lot of people got paid, that eventually dropped out, and we come to the Julian reforms then.

Let's talk about the Julian reforms with you, Robert Poole. What did Julius Caesar find about the calendar that he thought needed such reforming? He found that the calendar, the Roman calendar, which had been more or less inherited wholesale from Egypt, had slipped out of sync with the year by very nearly 100 days. This was partly because the Egyptian measurement of the year

at 365 and a quarter-ish days was not quite right, but partly also because these intercalorie days and months had been manipulated for various political purposes to influence the dates of elections and the terms of office and so forth. The days that didn't really count, the priests and the politicians had just used them to extend their stay in office and so and so forth. That's right, and for some reason,

the balls had all rolled to one side of the snooker table, all the days had accumulated, and the year was. nearly three months out of sync. What should have been the time of the spring equinox was actually being counted in winter. So in 45 BC there was a great year of confusion which consisted of 445 days which put everything back online. And then Caesar got his astronomer, So Cigonez, the Greek, to come up with a new calculation of the year. And they got it at 365 and a quarter days. And Caesar instituted the system of leap years, one day extra,

every four years, that kept the calendar more. or less on track for many centuries to come. They were only 11 minutes out on average for each year, and it was centuries before anybody even noticed. So it was remarkably accurate. So you think, and how successfully was this reform implemented? Did people begin to take the calendar more seriously because it was more accurate?

We don't have really any records or information about that. The interesting thing is that you could actually put all these extra days in a year, and it doesn't seem to have had any massive ill effects in a slow agricultural society that didn't. always calculate very precisely by days. Did it have any other uses this calendar that Caesar implemented? We know him best in this country as a general or whatever title he had in the warlord some way. Did it help him?

Did it help those sort of administrative military arrangements to have a more accurate calendar? It certainly helped taxation. In fact, the Roman cycle of taxation, the indiction remained in use in the Christian church until the early modern period. the Romans were famous for being extremely well-organised people, and the taxation system was helped no end by having accurate years. We should point out that Julius Caesar was assassinated the year after, and a lot of people thought this was because he interfered of the calendar.

He was assassinated in the Eulocyst and the Iids of March, wasn't it? What about those aides, and the way the Roman calendar worked before he got hold of it? I'd have to pass that one over to Peter, the classicist. Well, it was divided, their month was divided into the Kalins, which started on the New Moon. that's where our word calendar comes from, into the Ides, which was on the full moon, and Ides, I think, is derived from a word meaning to divide,

and the known as which was eight days before. And they numbered the days in those days. And this is the system in use in Rome, really, until Christian times and the astrological week that we use now sort of caught on, because astrology became very popular. in Augustine Rome. Can we talk about the Christian calendar now then, Christian Lippincol?

How did that, when did that start to sort of have a, when did the Christians start to have a voice in the calendar? Well, the early Christians just kept on with the Roman calendar and didn't really change it at all, except probably with a man named Dionysius Exigduus, or as we often say, Dennis the short, he was the one that said, why should we good Christians be keeping a Roman calendar?

Shouldn't we have a calendar based on the life of Christ? So he was the first one that really focused on the day of Easter. And that's when the problem started to arise with the calendar because Easter is essentially an inheritance from a lunar calendar. And the Roman civil year is essentially a solar calendar. And one of the problems with the lunar cycles and the solar. cycles is they don't match, or that's to say, they only line up once every 19 years. And this is why Easter's a movable feast. It sort of slides backwards and forwards in the civil calendar.

And so this is when the problem began, because people said, how are we going to start to fix our religious feasts, or how are we even going to know when the religious feasts happen when we've got this problem? And it was basically about 500 years of almost every educated monk involved in calendar studies. And just to reassite for people who might not be as up to date with early Christian history,

the idea of dating Easter correctly was astoundingly important to early Christians, wasn't it? It was crucially important, it's a better word. Well, obviously, if you're a whole religion, and that's perhaps putting it too broadly, but if you are a Christian, one of the main reasons

that you are a Christian is because on a certain day, with a certain kind of of celestial configuration, Christ was reborn. If you don't know what day that is, then this becomes really important. And one of the things it was established in the 4th century was that the Council of Nicaea said, we must fix the date of Easter. We must know when this happens.

And they came up with a formula. It's quite complex, and I probably won't remember it correctly, so please someone jump in and help me. Shall I push it over to Robert? He's worked out there. Can you tell us why it was so difficult today, Easter, Robert Poole, and what factors were involved that made it difficult? Well, it's not just the matter of actually combining a lunar calendar

with a solar calendar and the two not fitting, but there are also political or religious considerations because Christ was crucified around about the time of the Jewish feast of the Passover, which is lunar, but the one thing the early Christians wanted to do was to distance themselves from the Jewish calendar, the Jewish religion and Jewish practice. So they had to find a method. of having an Easter, which on the one hand would track the Passover so that Easter was happening at the right time in the year.

But on the other hand, it wouldn't actually reproduce it. And as a further complication, the Christian holiday was a Sunday, whereas the Jewish one was a Saturday. And the eventual result was the formula that Easter should be on the first Sunday, on or after the first full moon, after the vernal equinox, the spring equinox, which was defined as March the 21st, and not the actual natural equinox. And it was this fixing of Easter to a date and not to an actual natural event

that caused it to drift out when the calendar drifted out over succeeding centuries. When did they actually, Peter Watson, when did they actually get down to really fixing that? Well, I think it's important to say that for the first Christians, time was... We're talking about the first three centuries. Yeah, time really wasn't very much.

very important because they all thought. Well, the very early Christians it wasn't, yes, with Paul. They thought that, you know, in fact, Christ was coming again in their lifetime. So they didn't actually pay too much attention to time to begin with. And then it was a really rather amazing coincidence that Kristen had mentioned this 19-year cycle, which was pretty accurate, but not quite accurate. And then this chapter, victorious of Aquitaine found out that if you multiplied it by 28, it's even more accurate. So if you're still with me, we're on 19 times 28, which gives you 532. And Dennis the Small, so happened. He doesn't know it's the year 532 at the time. If anything, it's what, year 287 after the accession of Diocletian, the Roman Emperor.

So he does the calculations, and by an astounding coincidence, he's a year 287, he's a He finds that Christ was born exactly 532 years ago. In other words, the moon and the stars and the sun are in exactly the same position, the year he's doing this calculation as the year Christ was born, according to him. And therefore, this is surely a sign from God that this is, I'm in the right place at the right time, and this idea of dating everything from the birth of Jesus is assigned from God, saying, yes, go ahead and do it.

So that was when the dating began? Yes, and the previous reference point of the reign of Diocletian, Diocletian was famously a persecutor of Christians, so the birth of Christ was obviously a much better date for the Christian church by then. Who is it who took, did Beed, the Venerable Beed, for example, was he when he wrote his ecclesiastical history of England, did he bring dates to bear in now? Was he using that dating history that we've been talking about?

Most of the great, what we might call mathematicians, or you could call them religious men of the Middle Ages, were very interested in how the calendar worked. And one of the things that Bede recognized because there had been enough of a time difference from the early calendar is he started to notice that the equinox was slipping. The actual celestial equinox was slipping backwards against the calendar.

And he was one of the first people to say, we're going to have to do something about this calendar because we are slipping out of line with the stars. So there's this artificial and the natural almost in competition all the time, certainly often in contradiction, aren't they? Did they realise that at the time? It was realised by monks and astronomers

and those who observe the sky, but it didn't really matter in everyday life and plenty of civilisations, the entire Middle Eastern world, the entire Islamic world, works on calendars that don't quite lunar calendars that are very precise, the moon is very regular,

but they don't quite match the solar year, and you every now and again there's an intercalorie month. It doesn't matter too much whether you're anything up to two or three weeks out in the seasons, in an agricultural society. But of course it does matter when you're talking about calculating the date of Easter. And it was a source of great embarrassment to the Christian church that Islamic scholars would point out that their Easter, their famous holy day that was supposed to be on this first Sunday on or after the first full moon

after the equinox wasn't happening anywhere near the equinox at all. It was happening on completely the wrong date. and this appeared to undermine the claims of the Christian Church to be the true church. I mean, Christian is right. I mean, obviously East there is central to a Christian, and to celebrate it in those days, to celebrate it too early meant that you were guilty of hubris.

You didn't need God for salvation. And to celebrate it too late meant you didn't care. In both senses, sacrilegious, when the ancient kings in Egypt, when they came into office, had to swear that they would not change the calendar. Even today, I think, to change the Jewish calendar would need a meeting in the great Sanhedrin,

which is almost unthinkable to get together. And so, yes, it was very, very important. And then a whole law in Christianity developed, LORI, developed around this, that the spring equinox was the day of maximum light, because you had 12 days of sunlight and 12 hours, sorry, of moonlight. And the sun, the moon had borrowed light from the sun,

just as we borrow our salvation from Christ. And so this is how the importance of Easter really grew and why so much time and energy went into settling the date, not just for the year you were in, but for future years. Was this the time when the sacred and the scientific became very, very intensely intertwined? Well, they wouldn't have made those kinds of, kinds of distinctions. They were scientists because they were looking for answers to religious

problems. And it's one of those things that waxes and wanes itself. Sometimes people believe in dogma under the egos of religion. Sometimes they believe in dogma because under the egos of science. But just to add to what Peter was saying is another thing, I mean, in addition to both things that have been said, is if Easter was moving backwards against the equinox, there was a possibility that you'd have Easter backing in hundreds. of years, backing up against Christmas. And the horror of horrors would be that if you sacrifice Christ before he was born. And so anyone with any kind of sense of deep time realized that that was on the cards.

Can we move to 1582 when there's a next major reform, or a major reform of the calendar under Pope Gregory the 13th? Robert Poole, why was this necessary? And what did he do? Was he worried about the problem that Christian's been bringing? Worried about the problem of Easter in particular, yes. The calendar reform at the Roman Catholic Church of 1582 has been a good subject for Catholic historians because there's a traditional story told about the Protestant rise of science

and yet here we have a Catholic reform of the calendar which appears to present a big scientific correction before the Protestant rise of science. But in fact if you look back, the Catholic reform of the calendar was an act of the counter-reformation, an act of piety to do with the date of Easter. I mean, from the late Middle Ages, the Catholic Church had been aware and very anxious that the date of Easter was wrong. In fact, Copernicus was set on the job, and his book that was eventually published as De Revolutionubus in 1543 was, in fact, meant to be a first draft of a reform of the calendar, but he went a bit too far back to basics.

And they didn't get around to the actual calendar reform until the Counter-Reformation Council of Trent. And I think there was a sense in which the Counter-Reformation Council of Trent was a failure in bringing the whole of Christen. a Western Christendom back together, but they could at least have a single reformed calendar promulgated by the Roman Catholic Church under Papal Authority, and it would be obvious. It would generally accept that the calculations are right. So at least that was one small thing

that could become universal, a new corrected calendar. And what did this imply when they'd corrected it? Did days change? What happened then? They're not 10 days out of October 1582. It was promulgated by a papal bull, but very few countries, even Catholic countries, simply accepted the Papal bull.

They nearly all had some kind of law or civil decree that said we're reforming the calendar, not because the Pope says so, but because it's the right thing to do and because we say so. Even one of two Protestants' states picked up the reform, parts of the Netherlands, for example. As I understand it, it was more quickly accepted by Catholics

than by Protesters, whom, some of whom, including this country, resisted it for a very long time. Well, they thought it was a papist plot. Is he saying, wait a minute, you're taking away, You're taking away ten of our days. What's this all about then? And it's interesting because certainly when it was presented at the court of Elizabeth I first, her best scientist, he's often called a magician,

but her best scientist, John D, said, well, of course it makes sense. But it was the politicians who rallied around and elbowed D out of the way and said, no, something sneaky's going on here. We must stick to our own calendar. Well, they were rightly anxious about what the Pope's head, he just put a price on the head of Elizabeth I first, not a man entirely to be trusted in the courts of London, would you say? So there was something...

But D did his own calculations and came out with much the same as come out from the Council of Trent. He was a brilliant mathematician, and as I said, unfortunately in later ages we see him as some sort of crazy astronomer and magician, but he had the right kind of ideas. What were the consequences then of England and other Protestant countries resisting this Gregorian calendar?

and how long did they resist it for? So what happened? One date in this part of Europe, one date in the other part of Europe? Well, Brickon, I think, didn't go on to the new calendar until 1752. So there was, you know, nearly 200 years when they were using a different calendar. I mean, it wasn't quite as important as it as it is now.

You know, you didn't get chariot lag or galleon lag like you get jet lag. But there were other problems. I mean, one of the things that we think about was it was the us versus them. I mean, if you think about the calendar, regardless of whether you were using a Julian calendar or Gregorian calendar from country to country and sometimes even from town to town, the date on which you started the year changed. There were six different days that people would begin the year on.

So you could be in February, and it could be February 1501, February 1502. So the day actually, or the year, wasn't something that was really solidified until much later. So the major difference with the Julian calendar, as I understand it, was the difference of catching up on these days. Were there any other refinements on the Julian Canada? No, it was essentially the difference when Julian and Gorgheim was essentially the matter of the 10 days that were different. I mean, there was a real patchwork, as Christian says, of dates,

particularly in Central Europe, all the German Protestant and Catholic Princedoms. You could travel through several calendar zones in one day if you had a fast enough coach. And it created genuine difficulties with diplomatic correspondence as well, confusion of dates between diplomats. Certainly for historians, a big health warning, any historian who thinks that if it says 15th of February 1502 that he knows what day it is,

complete misunderstanding of how the calendars worked in those days. We don't know what year it was unless they marked it old style, new style, German style, Italian style, Ferreurese style, Milanese style. What effect did it have on the economy of these countries they're connecting economies?

I really don't think it had that much of effect because not only were the calendars different, weights and measures were different, and distances were different. And it was just sort of the kind of thing that you accepted. The same way that we crossed the border and we realize we have to give up our pounds for our euros, they would give up their calendar, their time, their measurements,

and their distances, and that was just something they accepted. It wasn't until travel became much, much more common. that people started to realize that it was an inconvenience. So Peter Watts was still in the 17th-18th century, 17th century we're talking about most people around to whom the calendar was significant more in personal terms than in any other, their feast days, their name days, their anniversaries, their festival days.

Yes, I think so. The other thing that happened at this time, of course, is the great voyages of discovery took place. And calendars around the world were discovered. in India, in Central America and in China, and found to be very different, or, well, found to be very different in some ways, and yet very similar in other ways,

like most calendars end up with about 360 days in the year, 12 times 30, and then something left over. And this was true in Central America, this was true in China, this was true in India, though India had six seasons, China had cycles of 10 days, cycles of 12 days all interlocking, and so did the Meso-Americans. And obviously the Jesuits thought that this was, this is proof, obviously, that these people were not saved and needed Christian help and so forth. They didn't have much success in changing that.

But as late as 1983, after Britain left India, Nehru, who was on a special commission, to look at the Indian calendar, found that there were 30 calendars in use in 1953 in India. But again, it was mainly, as Kristen says, an agricultural, fairly slow-moving society. And I think you could make too much of... We would think chaos would ensue. But we've only had the international date line since, what, 1886?

So we've only been living with just over a century of what you might call jet time, where minutes matter rather than years. It was in the middle of the 18th century that England finally accepted the Gregorian calendar. Why did they think that they could unbend then? Well, I think it's a combination of things. It's probably the religious split between Catholicism and Protestantism wasn't quite as strong during that particular period.

And also it did have to do with the increased trade in the continent. And a bit like the euro question today is if you're bringing a lot of merchandise back and forth, you sort of want to know what day it is. Robert Poole, did the calendar reform in England go smoothly? It was done by Lord Chesterfield, as I understand it, and what did he do? And it was quite dramatic. Well, the originator, if you like, the guiding light was Lord Chesterfield, who had been ambassador in France and had trouble writing to his mistress back in England

and having to date the correspondence correctly. and Chesterfield was well connected in the Royal Society and government and so forth, so it was able to pilot a calendar reform bill through Parliament. And what it did was to bring the English or now British Julian calendar in line with the continental calendar by removing 11 days from September 1752, so that Wednesday the 2nd of September was followed by Thursday the 14th of September. and there were 11 days simply missing. And it's wonderful if you look at diaries,

like ladies' diaries or farmers' diaries of the period, because they just say, this month is missing this many days, and there's just a big blank in the middle of the calendar, usually with little floral decoration or something like that. Or sometimes with a very complicated explanation. What was the reaction to this, there, and then what were the consequences?

Well, the consequences were quite mixed because the calendar was, in fact, only half-reformed. The act stated that any human or church date, should simply move with a new calendar, so that, for example, Christmas Day, December the 25th, would actually come 11 days sooner after the calendar of form, meaning after September the 2nd, 14th, there were now 11 shopping days fewer before Christmas.

So Christmas was actually moved forward in the natural year, which may account for the fact that we don't have many white Christmases. So Christmas used to be on our December the 14th? Christmas used to be on our January 5th or 6th or 6th. Oh, right, I got it the way around. Yes, yes, that's when old Christmases were more or less around 12th day now. However, there were two important exceptions made.

One exception was for fares. If you imagine a Micklemus fair on September the 29th, Micklemus is the time when apples ripen. You can bring your Micklemus fare forward 11 days in the natural year, but you can't make the apples ripen any sooner, and your Micklema's goose isn't going to be fat enough for the corporation feast. So fairs were to go with the old calendar, so your Micklema's fare was to happen in future on October the 10th.

And if you think about it, This means that there is 11 days fewer between old Micklemus and the new Christmas Day. So the relationship between the human year, the civil calendar, the church calendar, and the natural year, was permanently disrupted. And in the case of Chester, you can see this, Chester had a mare-making, a mayor celebration, on St. Denis's Day, which was the St. Denis's Day Fair in Chester. And what happened, of course, was the act brought the mare-making forwards by 11 days, but left the fair in the same. natural position. The two were sundered and they had to bring in an amendment to the calendar reform act, which was hurriedly tacked onto an act for presenting cattle distemper to bring the two back together. One of the things that seemed to upset people the most,

I mean, they say there were riots in the street, but I haven't actually seen any evidence that there were. You know, people waving banners saying, give us back our 11 days, seems to be a myth. But people were very concerned about taxes. Because if you've lost 11 days of income, but you still have to pay tax for a year, did you have to pay? that 11 days worth of income. And one of the things that did not change was the tax year. And this is one of the reasons, because the old English year ended in March 25th,

and one of the reasons why we still pay taxes beginning on April 6th is that's 11 days after March. That's New Year's Day was changed as well at the same time, wasn't it? Yes. New Year's day used to be in March and was changed at the same time. Yeah, that was a purely local convention. That was nothing to do with the Gregorian-Julian calendar.

when the peep stated his Dara on New Year, on 1st of January, all the newspapers were the 1st of January, the Almanacs were then, but just for certain legal purposes, it was still the 25th of March. So the legal year started on the 1st of January 2, but the tax year was left, in effect, where it is now. Inside what you were saying, Robert,

is there a sort of inference that the implication that somehow the natural year and the calendar year got out of sync, and the consequence, we're still living with the consequences of this, which are not entirely happy? We're still living with the tax year that starts on the 6th of April, the old tax year ends, in effect, on what is old lady day.

But yes, I mean in the upper echelons of society, amongst educated people, it was now normal to keep diaries and an almanacs and to follow time day by day. But lower down in society, people still regulated much more roughly by feast days. They would date things according to so many weeks or so many Sundays after Micklemus, or we still have Sundays in Advent before Christmas. And that calculation was lost to people, that relationship. But then the question that's really fundamental is, and perhaps what you're asking, is does it really matter?

I mean, does it matter if you have a certain fare when the apples ripen and it's called October 10th or it's called October 21st? You know, does it really matter? And this is one of the things that I'm always surprised when people talk about time or calendars or they write to me at the museum. They think these things are real, that they're true. They forget that all of our timekeeping. measurements are man-made. It's something

we've created. So it's more less making a rod for our own back. If things don't work, it's our fault. Has this now become, Peter Watson, has this now become the accepted calendar, the Gregorian calendar? Is it on the way to being a global calendar? You spoke of the Jesuits taking it to

America. I think it's a global calendar now. Yes, I mean, there are still remnants of other calendars. I mean, one, for example, is the Olympic cycle. There was a calendar or a cycle in ancient Greece, called the Octeteris, which was another cycle based on,

which went out of Kiltur and was corrected every eight years. And so the Greeks held the Olympic Games twice in an Octeteris every four years. And we still have that four-year cycle. So there are remnants, I think, all over the world. And, of course, the Islamic calendar is different. The Jewish calendar is different.

Chinese calendar? You know, these people live quite happily, I think. Jews in Britain live quite happily with both calendars, don't they? And so do the Indians. You can make too much of the difficulties, I think. You don't have to be a master mathematician to live with the fact, you know, we live with the fact that some months are 28 days, summer 29, summer 31, you know, we manage, don't we?

That came about through superstitions, about even days being unlucky and that sort of thing. 2931 business, isn't it? It goes back to the Roman calendar and Caesar's reform of the calendar and Augustus altering it. I don't know about any superstitions connected with it, but the simple point about the calendar is

that people always imagine that time should be mathematical and regular that we should have something like an equivalent of the metric system. And in the French Revolution, they did try to metricate the calendar into 10 days, 10 day weeks, but it just didn't work. It just wasn't accepted.

Mainly because they only had a day off every 10 days Yes, deeply unpopular. But what you have to accept is that the calendar, the elements of the calendar, simply don't divide into each other. They're incommensurable. It's like Alan Bennett's vicar and the sardine team. Whatever you do, there's always a little bit left in the corner. I mean, in the Russian Revolution, they had a week of five days with no time off,

and you can imagine how popular that is. And I did a couple of books out of Russia, and there was a practice there, as well as this five-day week in communist Russia, for people to work on Saturday mornings for the good of the state. They would work for nothing. This was after the weekend had been reintroduced in the Second World War. And if you did work on a Saturday morning, you were known as a Subbotnik. And this is the same word, Shabbat, Subbot, still surviving in Russia, in communist Russia.

So the Babylonian idea is still there until very, very recent in the last 10 years. How accurate is the present calendar? Technically, the... Good enough. Yeah, good enough. Good enough. I mean, technically the standard of time is the number of how many million vibrations

of a cesian atom. I don't know where they keep the actual atom, but there is a theoretical standard. But the interesting thing is that people have come up with all sorts of reform calendars. There's a sort of international standard calendar that was invented in Sweden, which is much too boring to be popular.

But whatever you do, whatever you do, in the end, all of these calendars, all these cesium atom vibrations, They all end up being adjusted back to the solar year. We get the extra pip now and again. The fundamental standard remains the solar year. And really, if we want a different calendar, we're going to have to go and colonise another planet.

The year is getting shorter, though, isn't it, by a few seconds every century or something? That's why we add the pips. It's to try to bring back. It's a nice sort of circle, because what we're trying to do is bring it back almost to Homerid Hesiod, so that you know that when the Pleiades are rising on the horizon,

you shouldn't go sailing. Well, that's what it's come to that, isn't? If you want to know the time, ask any stories. But to read for a Christian's point, I mean, there was an Easter act in Britain in 1928 which said that we could celebrate Easter. It was on the first Sunday after the second Saturday in April. But we never bothered implementing it. Because it's practically we know what to do now.

And so the mystery has gone out of it. I mean, you just have to imagine that there are seven planets circulating each other so that gravity is changing the, the configuration all the time. And this reinforced Robert's point that at any particular time the situation is untidy. But what you said earlier, Christian,

I don't know whether I agree with you when you said that it's all artificial the calendar. I agree with you. Intellectually, of course you're right, that it is artificial. But I would say now, many people in the world are much more calendar-driven than they are natural day-driven.

But that, I mean, it's a funny thing is we, as human beings, have fallen so in love with our own structures that we think that they're true. People have this thing on their wrist, and they think it controls their day. People have mobiles and it controls their day. People have a calendar, therefore they use it to control their day.

Try throwing away your wristwatch. You still live. Yeah, but you don't control your day if you have to trade in Hong Kong or get to Frankfurt by such and such a time or even get to Carlisle by such and such a time. You need dates and calendars. Too many people when I catch a train. Okay, with that.

Off on the train. Thanks very much. to all of you for talking about Kristen Lippincott, Peter Watson and Robert Poole, and thank you for listening. We'll be back in February. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com. com.com.com.com.