Today is the 271st anniversary of the day 2 September was followed by 14th, when England changed to the Gregorian calendar. We did this 170 years after Pope Gregory first came up with it, because he’d come up with it, and it was therefore beastly and Popish.
People were so weird about it, in fact, that they insisted on celebrating ‘Old Christmas Day’ on 6 January — and this continued right up to the 20th century (according to Steve Roud’s The English Year — customs, festivals and folklore “from May Day to Mischief Night”).
…and, according to Bentley’s magazine in 1847, the cattle who got down on their knees to mark the nativity could not only contemplate the mysteries of the divine, they were also aware of the change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar
None of this, though, was as ridiculous as the people rioting in the streets bellowing “Give us back our eleven days!” Or at least, they would have been ridiculous if anything even resembling this had ever happened.
In the words of historian Robert Poole, although there is
no better illustration of the collective idiocy of the crowd … The riots, like the Snark, are universally known but defy detection.
As one reference work puts it, slightly shamefaced: the riots
have been mentioned in a number of reputable texts about the change, including the Encyclopædia Britannica as recently as its 15th edition in 1976. But the evidence for these riots is scant.
There are two sources for the story — one being a satirical magazine which imagines “fires … kindled” in Smithfield, the other William Hogarth’s 1755 painting An Election Entertainment, which shows not a riot but Whigs feasting in a tavern.
If you peer very closely — or look at this blow-up — you can just make out a banner on the floor which says “Give us our Eleven Days”, which a Whig is supposed to have stolen from a Tory campaigner
In other words, the evidence of the riot is Hogarth, a satirist, suggesting that a Tory would carry such a banner and a Whig would knock him on the head with the stick he’s holding and nick it.
The satirical magazine was published by Lord Chesterfield, who championed the Calendar Act, and its piece finishes with the following sentence which basically means “Ha, ha, idiots — I won.”
The Oxford History of England says “the bill … passed without difficulty in parliament, but aroused much antagonism outside … for some time the most popular cry in the country was ‘give us back our eleven days’.” People were definitely pissed off.
Roy Porter, in English Society in the Eighteenth Century, says people might have quite reasonably feared a loss of wages, but where mathematician Gerald Whitrow, author of Time in History, got this from is anybody’s guess:
when the British government decided to alter the calendar, so as to bring it into line with that previously adopted by most other countries of Western Europe, and decreed that the day following 2 September should be styled 14 September, many people thought that their lives were being shortened thereby. Some workers actually believed that they were going to lose eleven days’ pay. So they rioted and demanded ‘Give us back our eleven days!’ (The Act of Parliament had, in fact, been carefully worded so as to prevent any injustice in the payment of rents, interest, etc.) The rioting was worst in Bristol, in those days the second largest city in England, where several people were killed.
Grumbling about infernal papists, yes; actual riots and deaths as a result? Complete balls.
