Calendar Changes and the Missing 11 Days
Timeline
1752
The solar year and the calendar year
do not match exactly so it is
necessary to introduce spare days from time to time. The first UK
calendar was loosely based on the original calendar introduced by the
Romans and named after Julius Caesar in his honour because he was the
man who introduced the “leap” year. In 46 BCE Julius realised
that something had to be done to avoid confusion and asked the experts
of the day to come up with an answer. When they calculated that the
solar year was actually 3651/4 days long he ruled that there should be
an extra day every four years to keep things in line.
The Julian calendar remained
unchanged for centuries and continued to
use the old month names derived from Latin such as octo, meaning eight,
as well as January being named after the god of doorways Janus – hence
January was the doorway to the new year. But by the sixteenth
century it was realised that Julius’s correction was still not enough
to make the solar and calendar years match. In the 1580s, Pope Gregory
XIII changed the system again so that years ending in 00 were only leap
years when divisible by 400 so 1900, 2100 etc. would not be leap years
but 2000 was.
The Gregorian calendar was adopted in
Great Britain in 1752 although it
meant that the country “lost” 11 days when the UK calendar was brought
into line with the rest of Europe, which was mainly Catholic and had
therefore adopted the Pope's ruling almost immediately. The dates
between September 2 and 14 of that year were deemed never to have
happened. Some people, however, were less than happy about it because
they thought they had been robbed of 11 days of their lives.