Why is the date given as February 10, 1693-94? Which
year is it?
Many researchers forget, or are completely unaware,
that
from October of 1582 there were two different calendars in use.
At that
time,
the Roman Catholic nations adopted the new Gregorian calendar, named
for
Pope Gregory XIII, while the Protestant and Orthodox nations continued
to
use the old Julian calendar. The British Empire did not make the
Gregorian
calendar official until 1752.
The two calendars were initially out of sync by ten
days. Thus, October 11, 1693 under the Gregorian calendar (New Style) was
October
1 under the Julian calendar (Old Style). The Gregorian calendar first
went into effect after October 4, 1582, making the next day October 15;
not all Catholic nations adopted it on this schedule, however, so some
local discrepancies did briefly remain.
The Gregorian calendar
also
utilizes a slightly more complicated formula for calculating leap
years,
in place of the Julian calendar's every-fourth-year system, which
caused
the discrepancy to increase by one day each in 1700, 1800, and 1900,
which
were each leap years under the Julian formula but not under the
Gregorian (2000 was a leap year under both calendars, but 2100 will not be).
The Gregorian calendar also introduced an
additional change which many people today are unaware of. The
Julian
and Gregorian systems are both solar calendars, based around the
seasons
and the corresponding four cycles of the sun: the Vernal (Spring) and
Autumnal
(Fall) equinoxes, and the Summer and Winter solstices. The Julian
calendar
sought to mark New Year's Day on the Vernal Equinox, the first day of
Spring,
as several other calendars do, which at the time the Julian calendar
was introduced fell on March 25. Given the 'drift'
that
resulted from the Julian calendar being fractionally too long, the date
of the Vernal Equinox began to slip. This slippage was the
principal reason for the Roman Catholic Church to demand a correction
of the calendar, since the accepted standard for dating the celebration
of Easter is the first Sunday after the full moon following the Vernal
Equinox; this standard originated with the early Christian Church of
Alexandria, which by then dated the Vernal Equinox as March 21, not
March 25, and was made official for the entire Christian Church by the
First Council of Nicaea in 325. The Council of Nicaea, however, had
mandated that Easter be calculated from March 21, not the actual
'observed' Equinox.
Given a drift in the Julian calendar of one day every 128 years,
by the middle of the 16th century the actual Equinox could be
observed to occur a full ten days prior to the Church-designated
Equinox of March 21, creating an increasing urgency within
the Church to restore and protect the 'correct' observance of
Christianity's holiest day. To further confuse calendrical
matters, the
Romans maintained a separate business year, much like the American
fiscal year which begins on October 1. The Roman business year
began on the first day of their eleventh month, named for the god
Ianus, which we know as January. After the fall of the Roman
Empire, the newly emerging European nation-states were left on their
own to set their own calendars. The Roman Catholic Church, which
was still a dominant force in Western Europe, encouraged these nations
to select a prominent Christian festival as the legal New Year's Day.
March 25, the offiical New Year's Day of the Roman Empire is the
Feast of the Annunciation; other recommended options were December 25
(the Feast of the Nativity of Jesus) and Easter Day (not being a
constant date, this one didn't get many takers). In England,
the legal New Year's Day remained March 25 until 1752, but Scotland had
already changed New Year's Day to January 1 in 1600. Neither the
Gregorian calendar, nor the papal bull ordering its adoption, specified
a set Gregorian New Year's Day, but the Roman Catholic Church quickly
followed the new calendar with a revised calendar of saints and feast
days, correcting those dates to New Style; that calendar of saints
began with January and concluded with December, from which nations
adopting the Gregorian calendar determined that January 1 was to be the
common Gregorian New Year's Day.
The change created, or at least exacerbated,
record-keeping nightmares as the
Roman
Catholic nations of Europe, and their colonial empires, marked the New
Year
almost three months earlier than some of the non-Catholic nations.
Particularly
since
trade refused to be limited by political and religious boundaries, some
sort
of compromise had to be found. For an English merchant trying to
sell
goods to a merchant in Spain, the legal calendar in England proclaimed
the
date to be February 10, 1693, while the Spaniard's calendar said it was
February
21, 1694; likewise, a Scottish merchant would reckon the date as
February 10, but the year as 1694.
In the British Isles, both England and Scotland had
ignored the new Gregorian calendar, but as already indicated, these two
nations observed New Year's Day on different dates: Scotland on January
1, England on March 25. This difference became an issue with the union
of England and Scotland, first by personal union in 1603 when
James VI, King of Scots, succeeded Elizabeth I on the throne of
England, and by full political union in 1707 when Scotland and England
jointly agreed to form the Kingdom of Great Britain. The Acts of Union,
by which the Kingdom of Great Britain was created, did not reconcile
the different legal dates for New Year's Day. At some point after the
personal union, a compromise began to go into effect, using a
hyphenated date format for the period from January
1
through March 24 to prevent misinterpration. Thus, the date would be
recorded as February 10, 1693-94. From a
modern
perspective, we would consider the year to have been 1694, while from
an historical perspective we would want to reference it as 1693, since
that was correct at that time.
In Great Britain, and its empire, the Julian
calendar
remained in force until 1752. The difference in dates for New Year's
Day between England and Scotland demanded a more permanent and uniform
fix, while the tremendous growth in learning that had taken place since
the late 1500s led to a broader understanding of the fact that the
Gregorian calendar was demonstrably superior to the Julian. As a
result, the Parliament of Great Britain
enacted the Calendar (New Style) Act 1750, which established that the
year 1752 would begin on January 1 (Old Style), rather than March 25,
thus making 1751 a short year, and that the transition to the Gregorian
calendar would be completed by the necessary removal of eleven days
following Wednesday, 2 September 1752, making the next day Thursday, 14
September.
Looking at this from the perspective of genealogy,
it
is important to know that virtually all of the recorded dates in what
was
then British North America were Old Style through 2 September 1752.
The
use of the hyphenated date format is both historically accurate as that
is
how the date probably was recorded, and helps to clarify that the date
is
indeed Old Style. Some genealogical authors have created much
confusion not only by not hyphenating dates for this period, but by
arbitrarily imposing January 1 as New Year's Day even when that was not
historically accurate, and rendering 10 February 1693-94 as 10 February
1694. For a subsequent researcher trying to interpret this date,
this raises the question of whether this date means 1694-95, which
would be an historically accurate reading of the date, or 1693-94, which would be correct by
our modern standards but not those of the time.
A
record gives the date as 18 : 9: 1653. Isn't this September 18,
1653?
No. The date as expressed above is the 18th
day of the 9th month of 1653, but under the Julian calendar, both as
originally used by Rome and as adopted in English law, September
was not the 9th month, but the 7th. The Julian calendar counted
March as the first month rather than the third, and in English law that
remained the case until the end of 1751. As a result, the
9th month was November. This distinction becomes important when
reading the records of some Protestant churches. Some of these
churches found it offensive to record dates with months named for
'pagan' gods or leaders. Instead, they would record the date just
using the number of the month as shown above.
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