Hi, I’m the History Guy. I have a degree in history and I love history,
and if you love history too, this is the channel for you.
Here's an interesting question of historical trivia. What important historical event occurred
on September 5th of 1752, in England? If you don't immediately know, you can try to divide
it from the period. George the Second was King of England, Henry Pelham was Prime Minister,
England was not technically at war, but they were conducting a proxy war against the French
on the Indian subcontinent. And in the colonies, Ben Franklin conducted his famous electricity
experiment with his kite earlier in the year in 1752. And if you still don't know what important
event happened on September 5th, it's in fact a trick question. No historical events of any
importance occurred in England on September 5th of 1752, and we know that because there was no
September 5th…in England…in 1752. And the reason why, is a story that deserves to be remembered.
There's archaeological evidence that people had methods of keeping time based on the
lunar cycles as far back as the Neolithic period. In 2013, archaeologists discovered
a group of pits in Aberdeenshire in England, that appear to correspond with the phases of
the Moon that dates back some 10,000 years, and may be the world's oldest known lunar calendar,
although there is some dispute over that claim. As the phases of the Moon are easy to observe,
they serve as an effective method of tracking time, and lunar calendars are still used today
by some cultures, to determine religious holidays. And while it makes sense to track time based on
the phases of the Moon, there is a problem. As the moon is not in sync with the Sun, and thus,
12 lunar periods is only 354 days. Well short of a solar year. The period of time required
for the earth to make one complete revolution around the Sun. The problem is that tracking
time by the moon means that lunar months will cycle through the seasons, making a lunar
calendar a poor tool regarding one of the most important reasons to track months, agriculture.
The problem is usually addressed through a process called intercalation, in which
additional days are added in order to sync a lunar calendar with the seasons. Since a solar year does
not include a whole number of lunar months, most so-called, lunisolar calendars, count
12 lunar months as a year, but add an additional month every 2 or 3 years, in order to resync the
calendar with the seasons. And thus, different years will have different numbers of days.
There are various methods of interpolation used for lunisolar calendars, although the one used
by the Banks Islands of Vanuatu based on the spawning cycle of the Palolo worm,
is perhaps the most interesting. The early Roman calendar was such a lunar solar calendar. The
Romans tried to synchronize the months with the first crescent moon following a new moon,
resulting in some months of 29 days, and some months more. They then used intercalation
to sync the calendar, every other year they would shorten February, and add a leap month,
or intercalaris. That process is still the reason that February has 28 days on the modern calendar.
Roman debts were typically due on the first of each month, called the calendae, and payments were
tracked in a ledger book called the calendaria, which is the genesis of the term calendar.
But the process was still imperfect, adding approximately four days every four years,
too much to be in line with the solar year, and of course over time that would show,
as the calendar would no longer be in sync with the seasons. So in 46 BC, Julius Caesar consulted
a Greek astronomer named Sosigenes of Alexandria, to create a better calendar. The new calendar
divided a 365 day year into 12 months, with some months 31 days, and some 30, but retaining the
shortened 28-day February. But an intercalation was still required to keep the calendar in sync,
and so one additional day was added to February every four years. The so-called Julian calendar
was used by edict throughout the empire, but it still had a flaw. The average length of a year
on the Julian calendar is 365.25 days, but a solar year is actually slightly shorter,
365.2425 days. A difference of three days every 400 years, or about 2/10 of 1%.
That seems small, but over enough time it became a problem, and was most noticeable in
terms of a specific religious holiday, Easter. Easter is the most important Christian feast,
and it's date traditionally was determined based on a solar event, the vernal equinox.
But the day was actually fixed by the calendar, and Caesar's two-tenths of a percent discrepancy
meant that over sixteen hundred years later, Easter was no longer landing where Easter had
traditionally been celebrated by early Christians relative to the vernal equinox. And so in 1582,
Pope Gregory the thirteenth introduced a calendar reform called, the Gregorian calendar,
that adjusted the Julian calendar so that rather than a leap year every four years, every year
that was exactly divisible by four would be a leap year, except for years that were exactly
divisible by 100. But those century years are leap years, if they are exactly divisible by 400.
And so, for example, the year 2000 should have been a leap year because 2,000 is
evenly divisible by four, but should not have been a leap year because 2,000 is
evenly divisible by 100, but was a leap year because 2,000 is evenly divisible by 400.
The Gregorian calendar is the calendar most commonly used, at least for civil purposes,
throughout the world today. But that was still a problem. In 1501, King Henry the
Seventh of England's oldest son, Arthur the Prince of Wales, married Catherine of Aragon,
the youngest surviving child of King Ferdinand II of Aragon, and Queen Isabella the first of
Castile. The goal of the marriage was to cement an alliance between England and Spain, but just
20 weeks after being married, Arthur died of a sweating sickness. Still trying to make a marital
alliance with Spain, Henry the seventh betrothed his dead son's bride to his second son Henry, just
11 years old. Although the two did not actually marry until 1509, after Henry ascended to the
throne as Henry the eighth, following his father's death. But by 1525 Henry became frustrated as he,
and Catherine, had failed to produce a male heir. One son had died after just seven weeks,
and two more had been stillborn. Moreover, Henry had fallen in love with another woman,
Anne Boleyn, who refused to be seduced so long as she could not be queen. That prompted Henry
to seek an annulment from the Pope, Pope Clement the seventh, claiming that his marriage was
blighted in the eyes of God, because Catherine had been his brother's widow. The Pope refused
on multiple grounds. One of which might well have been that following the sack of Rome in 1527,
the Pope was being held prisoner by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles the Fifth, who happened to be
Catharine of Aragon's nephew. Frustrated, Henry the eighth married Anne Boleyn anyway in 1533,
and the Pope responded by excommunicating Henry, causing England to break with the
Roman Catholic Church, and establish the independent Church of England in 1534.
And England and the Pope were still not on good terms 48 years later, when Pope Gregory
changed the calendar. While the Gregorian calendar became Catholic Canon via a papal bull in 1582,
most Protestant nations, like England, thumbed their nose at Gregory and continued on with
the Julian calendar. In fact, Henry's daughter, Elizabeth the first, briefly considered adopting
a similar reform, but gave up under opposition from Anglican Church bishops who argued that
the Pope was literally, the biblical fourth Great Beast of Daniel. The split was still
an issue in 1754. Understand that George II was only King because, in his grandmother's time,
50 Catholics who were higher in line for the throne have been excluded, based on acts of
parliament, that restricted the royal succession to Protestants. But much of the rest of Europe
had switched in the intervening time, including the other half of the United Kingdom, Scotland,
which had moved to the Gregorian calendar under King James the sixth, in 1600. And Parliament
complained, “That because of the discrepancy in dates between England and most of her neighbors.
Frequent mistakes are occasioned in the dates of deeds, and other writings, and
disputes arise therefrom.” And so, the Calendar Act of 1750 moved England to what was, in effect,
the Gregorian calendar, without actually using that name. To facilitate the change,
and sync with their neighbors, eleven days had to be removed from the calendar in 1752,
to account for the effect of nearly 18 centuries of Julius Caesar's two-tenths
of a percent miscalculation. Citizens of England went to bed on September 2nd 1752, and woke up the
next day on September 14th. Nothing happened on September 5th, because there was no September 5th.
In addition to moving England to the Gregorian calendar, the Calendar Act of 1750 also made the
official start of the new year in England, January 1st. Prior to the Calendar Act,
the New Year actually started in England on March 25th. There has been some historical argument that
there were riots based on the Calendar Act, that people are in the streets shouting, “Give us back
our lost 11 days!” But most historians agree now that no riots occurred, and that that myth started
because of a misunderstanding of some political satire that is written to make fun of Tories, who
tried to make the calendar reform an issue in the election of 1755. England was by no means the last
country to move to the Gregorian calendar. Sweden, for example, tried to start moving gradually,
starting at 1700, and taking out a day a year. But that resulted in a period where they were off
of both the Julian calendar and the Gregorian calendar, and so they gave that up, and they
didn't end up making the change actually until a year after England, when in 1753, they just made a
short February. Many Eastern European countries didn't actually make the move until the 20th
century. In Russia, for example, the move was not made until after the October Revolution of 1917,
and ironically, when the dates are adjusted, the October Revolution didn't occur until November.
Some nations today still use the Julian calendar to determine things like religious holidays,
but use the Gregorian calendar for civil business. Notably, former Protestant and Orthodox countries
adopted the solar part of the Gregorian calendar, but they rejected the lunar part, which was used
to determine the date of Easter. Instead they use a completely different calculation that comes to
the exact same answer, but doesn't give credit to a Catholic pope. And what might seem a historical
triviality to say that nothing happened in England between September 4th and September 13th of 1752,
because they skip those 11 days. It is undoubtedly extremely useful, that despite
all our other disagreements, the vast majority of the world at least agrees on today's date.
I'm the History Guy and I hope you enjoyed this edition of my series, 5 minutes of history,
short snippets of forgotten history five and ten minutes long. And if you did enjoy it, please go
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