New Year’s Day 2025
By the mid 1700s in England there was a curious juxtaposition between the lore of New Year’s Day and the law of New Year’s Day.
The legal system, the government, the established church, and business: all insisted that the year began on 25 March – Lady Day.
That would be the date on which, say, 1748 would become 1749.
This sort-of-made-sense for many reasons.
It would make the month beginning with ‘Sept’ the seventh month, and the month beginning with ‘Oct’ the eighth month, and so on.
It also meant that years began in spring, rather than in midwinter (bleak or otherwise).
It accorded with the conventions of business and legal transactions – and even today 25 March is one of the quarter days on which certain debts become due.
(Also at this time, Acts of Parliament and other legal instruments were usually dated by regnal years anyway.)
And it even fitted with the Christian year, for the feast of Annunciation was a good time to get spiritual things going for a new circuit of the sun, with Christmas then neatly coming nine months later.
Linguistically, legally, administratively, commercially, spiritually – everything pointed to 25 March being the start of the year.
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But.
There was a problem.
And the problem was that people ignored what they were supposed to think, and carried on celebrating the new year on 1 January anyway, as they had done since time immemorial.
Even within the court and the corporations – as Ronald Hutton details in his great book The Stations of the Sun – they privately celebrated the new year on 1 January.
There was thereby a tension – indeed a contradiction – between the lore of new year and the law of new year.
This, in turn, had practical problems.
As A. F. Pollard explains in this informative 1940 paper, wills and other legal instruments affecting normal people often had date errors, because what people believed to be the new year contrasted with the official position.
(It also meant problems in respect of dealing with Scotland which had sensibly moved to a 1 January start date back in 1600.)
It did not matter what the church and parliament and the crown and the courts said, people persisted in acting as if the year changed on 1 January.
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And so in 1750 the church and parliament and the crown and the courts gave up.
An Act of Parliament was passed switching the start of the year to 1 January:
The Act had this wonderful preamble:
“Whereas the legal Supputation of the Year of our Lord in that Part of Great Britain called England, according to which the Year beginneth on the 25th Day of March, hath been found by Experience to be attended with divers Inconveniencies, not only as it differs from the Usage of neighbouring Nations, but also from the legal Method of Computation in that Part of Great Britain called Scotland, and from the common Usage throughout the whole Kingdom, and thereby frequent Mistakes are occasioned in the Dates of Deeds, and other Writings, and Disputes arise therefrom […]”
This was also the Act which switched the English calendar to the Gregorian calendar, omitting the days from 2 September to 14 September 1752.
(See what you can do with Acts of Parliament. Just as powerful on matters timey wimey as any Doctor Who scriptwriter.)
Lore had prevailed over law: what people believed and practically understood to the case forced the official position to yield.
Law can only conflict with lore for so long.
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Happy new year to all the followers of this blog, and thank you for your support.
This is also, I believe, why the start of the tax year is April 6th.
It was previously New Year’s Day (25th March), but if that remained, then it would be a year 12 days shorter after the Julian/Gregorian change, and the revenue weren’t going to be diddled out of any days income, let alone the number of days if it was brought forward to Jan 1st.
So the 12 days were added, to ensure a whole year of tax revenue, taking it from 25th March to 6th April.
(An aside: if researching genealogical records, you will sometimes see dates in years prior to 1752 written as, for instance, 3rd February 1648/49 to remind that the year could be considered differently depending on calendar or indeed location)
It (3/25) is the date I was released from the US Army. It’s the best damned day of the year!
This is marvellous – and excellent timing as I was about to start researching the date changes for a project I’m working on. Thank you!
All the very best to you and yours for the new year.
Happy New Year!
Changing back to the 25th March should seem essential to the Brexit mindset of Sovereignty.
Note that just as before, Scotland would rightly be in dissent.
I love it.
This sort of thing quite makes my day.
Happy New Year to you!
Fascinating piece – thank you
Thank you for this timely and informative information. I also liked the note at the end about the adaptation to the Georgian calendar. I was thinking recently that I remembered from my schooldays (not quite Georgian times but sometimes feel as far off) learning about the protests – even riots – over the eleven days “Give us back our Eleven Days” (not the last, nor the least rational, protest against ‘European’ harmonisation to take place in this country) so it is great to see this context.
Aha, those protests have been caricatured by history textbook writers, I fear.
I read somewhere that the protestors were people who paid rent monthly but were paid salaries weekly, so the change meant quite a big monetary loss.
There wee some valid financial complaints.
But the notion that people believed they had been literally robbed of eleven or so days of their lives is overstated.
Where I volunteer, (among other things) we help people work out income and expenditure and a number of them cannot understand, however many ways one explains, that months don’t (save February) have four weeks. These clients are left bewildered or feel cheated or both.
Thank you. Very interesting, and I have learnt a new word: ‘supputation’. Not in my Chambers (so no good for Scrabble) but Google says it means ‘the act of calculating, reckoning or computation’, in case anyone else was wondering.
Happy New Year, either now or in March (for diehards among us).
And, I believe, why the tax/ financial year runs from 6th April. It was 25th March but when the Gregorian calender switch occured, the date moved to avoid the loss of 12 days revenue and the like
The Quarter Days, (Lady Day, 25 March, Midsummer’s Day, June, Michaelmas 29 September and Christmas Day 25 December) are still regularly used as the days rents and other payments become due, particularly in agriculture.
Really interesting David many thanks. Lady Day also marked the start of the New Year in Ireland as well as the “colonies” which causes confusion for some in today’s Northern Ireland who celebrate the Battle of the Boyne on the 12th July, an event which in fact took place on July 1st.
Although the explanation behind the change helps, I still wonder how the Scots still seem to lay claim to New Year celebrations and Hogmanay
Could be we are also celebrating the turn of the seasons and the nights shortening again?
The Jewish New Year is always in the autumn but not on the same date. Last year it started in the evening of 2nd October, this year 22nd September. But many, or most, Jews also celebrate 1st January. So we get two New Years!
The following, from “Para Handy Tales” by Hugh Munro, first appeared in a series of newspaper articles published before the First World War.
‘Dougie wass mate, and I wass skipper. I don’t know if you kent the Fital Spark?’
The Vital Spark, I confessed, was known to me as the most uncertain puffer that ever kept the Old New-Year in Upper Lochfyne.
‘That wass her!’ cried Macfarlane, almost weeping. ‘There was never the bate of her, and I have sailed in her four years over twenty with my hert in my mooth for fear of her boiler.’
Whether this contributes to the present discussion I know not, but such beautiful writing deserves a wider airing from time to time.
David, Thank you, this is really interesting, good to know. I appreciate that you share knowledge, information that I would never know. Keep up the good work and Happy New Year xx
We are so far along in science with the measurement of natural phenomena that we ought to measure the jewelry of time (if it still exists) according to the celestial machinations that encompass us. The pagans, Mayans et al had it right and we should relinquish the biblical misadventures that preceded the lame superstitions of cloistered wishes in the Near East.
We should use the stars to navigate our customs and not wishful thinking of the religious bigots .
A competition of people from all global cultures should assemble at Easter (rabbis included) to vote for the day we pay our cosmic taxes.