Considering Lady Day and the New Year
Trinity Church in Boston has an interesting gap within its records which indicates that no births, baptisms, or burials were recorded as taking place in the parish between September 3 and 13/14th 1752.[1]
The unstated reason for this was the implementation of the 1751 “Act for Regulating the Commencement of the Year; and for Correcting the Calendar now in Use,” which the British Parliament had made law the previous year — and therefore applied to the whole of Great Britain, all its colonies, and dominions. Somewhat belatedly, on October 17, 1752, the Boston Gazette or Weekly Journal summarized matters thus:
“All succeeding Time is to be reckoned in the same Order as formerly, only that the Year is ever hereafter to begin absolutely on the 1st Day of January yearly, and the absurd Method of beginning it on the 25th Day of a Month [March] exploded; and that Month, January, is for ever to be called the First Month …. All the fixed Feasts of the Church are to be observed on their proper nominal Days, which will make them 11 Days earlier than heretofore. But all BirthDays, Apprentices & Servants Times, Periods of Payment of Money either Principal or Interest, or Expiration of Leases, &c. &c. are to have their natural Days, which seemingly will move them eleven Days forward.”
The history of this calendrical upheaval, and the consequent apparent loss of eleven days in 1752, had actually begun decades earlier with a papal bull issued by Pope Gregory XIII, on February 24, 1581/2: decreeing that the Gregorian calendar would henceforth revise the Julian one, instituted by Julius Caesar, on the 1st January in the year 45 BC. That calendar had been eleven minutes a year too long, thus creating a cumulative error amounting to a difference between the two calendars of eleven days by the mid-eighteenth century.
Aside from the “lost” days, what is also notable was that the start of each New Year was by this act moved backwards from March to the 1st of January, which marks for us the calendrical New Year we celebrated this week, as indeed it had for Julius Caesar. So why in between had a New Year been observed as starting on 25th March? The answer lies in the fact that it was Lady day; the 25th March was not only a new year’s day “Supposed,” as the 1611 Authorized Version dictates “to be the first day upon which the world was created,” but also that of the Annunciation, and thus exactly nine months before Christmas day.
All of which should serve to remind us that, however compelling a milestone the fact of a whole year passing and a new one beginning may be, it is the context within which we frame such otherwise arbitrary times that gives them their deeper meaning — which is why birthdays are so important to us as well.
At its most brutal, each passing year reminds us that we each have one fewer left of our earthly lives. This no doubt drives the urge to self-improvement captured in all those New Year’s resolutions we hear of. But more positively, with our dating of the calendar in years since the birth of Christ, we are once again brought back to that event as the hinge moment upon which all history and creation turns — when the possibility of redemption was made available to all those who believe in Christ.
In the words of Isaiah chapter 9:
The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light:
they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death,
upon them hath the light shined…
For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given:…
and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor,
The mighty God,
The everlasting Father,
The Prince of Peace.
Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end….
The Rev. Canon Alistair Macdonald-Radcliff
Rector
[1] See, Andrew Oliver and James Bishop Peabody, eds., Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, vol. 55: Collections: The Records of Trinity Church, Boston, 1728-1830, 2 vols. (Boston, I982), 2:540, 722.).