Why Britain Lost 11 Days in September 1752

Do you know how many British people were born between September 3 and September 13 in the year 1752? None. Absolutely no one was born, nobody died, and no marriages took place during that period. No wars were fought, no bets were made, no trade deals were signed. As a matter of fact, these eleven days didn’t even exist in the British calendar. People went to bed on the night of September 2, 1752, and woke up on September 14. The loss of eleven days was the expected consequence of changing calendars. Before September 2, 1752, Britain was using the Julian calendar, while most of its neighbors had already moved to the more accurate Gregorian calendar. Nearly seventy years after it was proposed, Britain found itself slowly falling out of sync with the rest of the world. To fix that, the parliament passed the Calendar (New Style) Act 1750. Calendar courtesy: timeanddate.com What’s wrong with the Julian calendar? The Julian calendar was proposed by Julius Caesar in 46 BC in order to fix the inherent errors of a lunisolar calendar, which the Roman calendar was. The Roman calendar consisted of 12 months for a total of 355 days, which is approximately 10 days shorter than the solar year. In order to catch up with the sun, the Roman calendar added either 22 or 23 days to every alternate year, the same way we add leap days every four years. As a result, Roman years alternated between 355, 377 and 378 days. To make matter worse, the leap days (also known as the intercalary period) were not added in a regular and systematic manner, but was determined by the Pontifex maximus, the high priest of the College of Pontiffs. Often the Pontifex would lengthen a year when his political allies was in office, and reduce it when his opponents were in power. The net effect of this was that the average Roman citizen often did not have a clue what date the current day was.