1st BOC show of the new century!

[Eric Siegerman]

On Sat, Jan 22, 2000 at 05:22:21PM -0500, K Henderson wrote:
> Eric S. said...
>
> >When Britain went Gregorian, they also changed New Years from 25
> >March to 1 January, as stipulated by Pope Gregory.
>
> Why was New Years chosen as January 1 anyway?  I've never been curious
> enough to search into this, but I've always figured it must've been based on
> the date of perihelion.  It's currently Jan. 4, but because it cycles
> through the calendar year every 23,000 years or so, it would only take about
> 200 years for it to drift 3 days (though I can remember at the moment which
> way it drifts, forward or backward).

Dunno, but it goes *way* back.  Julius Caesar decreed it, but [1]
calls it "an earlier calendar reform that had not always been
adhered to".  The ancients were more clueful than the mediaevals
about some things, but I suspect orbital eccentricity is pushing
it :-)

I guess they wanted, for whatever reason, to start the year at
the winter solstice instead of the spring equinox, and made the
quite reasonable decision that having New Years in the middle of
the month was a really dumb idea and they should stop doing it,
so they settled for the nearest month-end rather than the
solstice itself.

> Now though, that I realize the Catholic Church was involved, I see it must
> be something much more meaningful.  :)  And totally unrelated to the perihelion.

Well, they *undid* that bit of Caesar's reform.  "... the church
didn't like the wild parties that took place at the start of the
new year, and in AD 567 the council of Tours declared that having
the year start on 1 January was an ancient mistake that should be
abolished." [2]  They then go on to list 7 different schemes that
were in use before the Gregorian reformation which assigned New
Years to Jan. 1 for good(?).


Incidentally, the weird month lengths aren't Caesar's fault.
Starting in March (notwithstanding that he moved New Years to
January), his year went 31, 30, 31, 30, ... right through until
it ran out of days at the end of February, which only got 29 days
(30 in leap years).  The Senate renamed the month Quintilius
after him (hence July).

And then he was offed, and Octavian became emperor and renamed
himself Augustus.  The senate decided to honour Augustus with a
month too and accordingly renamed Sextilis.

Of course it just would not do for Augustus's month to be shorter
than Julius's, so they stole a day from February to make August
31 days long, and switched the lengths of the remaining four
months to keep from having three 31-day months in a row.


References:
[1] Duncan, David Ewing, "Calendar: Humanity's Epic Struggle to
    Determine a True and Accurate Year" (Avon Books, 1998).  Good
    book; readable, entertaining, and packed with obscure details
    like the month-length story, and also the stuff I said before
    about Newton.

[2] Calendar FAQ: <http://www.tondering.dk/claus/calendar.html>

I didn't use the following for this post, but did for my earlier
ones:

[3] "The Catholic Encyclopedia", entry for "Chronology",
    <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03738a.htm>

[4] "The Catholic Encyclopedia", entry for Dionysius Exiguus,
    <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05010b.htm>

[5] The Calendar Zone, <http://www.calendarzone.com/> --
    somebody's labour-of-love index of calendar-related Web sites

--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.        erics at telepres.com
|  |  /
Microsoft Lego would have square pips.