Medieval calendars

We take calendars for granted.  Doubtless there is one hanging on a wall somewhere near you.  We write appointments on the calendar--"Billy to the doctor at 4:15 on the 21st."

Medieval people had the same basic calendar we do (365 days spread over 12 months, the same ones with 30 or 31 days, February always gets shorted but does get an extra day every 4 years).  This is and was your basic Julian calendar.  But, just as medieval people thought about telling time differently (as I have discussed earlier), so they thought of calendars differently.

They would not have a page for each month with an attractive picture (flowers, a rural scene, puppies) next to a grid of little boxes, each with a day number.  (This is an attractive rural scene, in case you couldn't tell.)

Instead each day of the month would be listed underneath the others.  Next to it would be the saint whose special day it was, whose anniversary would be celebrated that day.  Although modern Catholicism has a saint for every day of the year, a lot of medieval calendars wouldn't have anyone special to commemorate on many days.  Unusual events might also be noted, such as an eclipse or a flood.

One of the most important things to note on a calendar was Easter.  In the Middle Ages, Easter was by far the most important religious holiday, unlike today when it has to take a back seat to Christmas.  Easter is now (as then) the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Equinox.  As you can imagine, it moves around a lot.  Exactly when the Spring Equinox falls is open to discussion, and do you count the first full moon as the day whose evening sees it rise or the following day?  In 2016, Greek Orthodox Easter fell in May, a month after Latin Easter.  Medieval people had all sorts of charts and tables trying to show when Easter would be next year.

We assume the new year starts in January.  Some medieval people did as well.  But depending on the region, the new year might start at Christmas, at Easter, or even at the Incarnation (March 25, nine months before Christmas, when Mary became pregnant).  Easter was the most common, which meant that if Easter was early one year and late the next, a "year" might have almost two whole Aprils in it, one at each end.  Sometimes, especially in Italy where the cities were in fierce competition, one could be off by one or two years just by walking a short distance from one city to another.

We count days of the month by the day, 1st, 2nd, etc.  Medieval people, like the Romans, were more likely to refer to the kalends or the ides.  The kalends was the 1st (it's where the word "calendar" comes from).  So a medieval document might be dated by "the second kalends of June," meaning the next to last day of May.  Ides fell in the middle of the month (Caesar was famously assassinated on the Ides of March, or March 15).

© C. Dale Brittain 2016

"In the Deep Midwinter"

We take calendars for granted.  These days, your cell phone will tell you what day it is.  And there's the calendar hanging on the wall, the announcement on the radio, the newspaper, etc.

But figuring out what day it was, or even what year it was, was not self-evident in the Middle Ages.  They were working with the Julian Calendar, one of the few things Julius Caesar was responsible for in the brief interlude between becoming emperor and being assassinated on the Ides of March, the assassins' unrealized intent being to restore the Roman Republic.

The Julian Calendar recognized, as previous calendars had not, that the year is not exactly 365 days long, but rather 365 1/4.  This is why we have "leap year" every four years, with an extra day.  Before the institution of leap year, the calendar would creep, getting 1 more day out of synch with the seasons every four years.  After a while, one starts to notice.  Ancient Egypt, that had a 365-day calendar, had had a long enough civilization for festivals to work their way all the way around the year twice.

The Julian Calendar was thus a great improvement.  But a year is still not exactly 365 1/4 days long.  To make it work just right, you have to skip leap year every 100 years, but have leap year every 1000 years (we had leap year in the year 2000).  So, although from the first century on they no longer had the problem of getting further out of synch with the seasons by one day every four years, they were still gradually getting out of synch by one day every century.

Thus, by the late Middle Ages, they were about two weeks off, with Christmas coming not within a few days of the winter solstice (shortest day of the year) but rather in what we think of as January.

Christmas carols from the Middle Ages and Renaissance have lines like, "In the deep midwinter, frosty winds made moan, earth as hard as iron, water like a stone."  It's still bitterly cold in January in the northern hemisphere (at least in those parts that get cold), but we now assume Christmas is earlier, at the beginning of winter.

The modern calendar is called the Gregorian Calendar, pronounced by Pope Gregory XIII, who was concerned at Easter's drift away from the equinox.  Protestant countries, including the American colonies, initially refused to recognize it, assuming it was some sort of papal plot.  When the American calendar was finally changed, in the late eighteenth century, a number of people were distraught over their "missing" weeks.

Click here for more on telling time in the Middle Ages.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014
For more on medieval life, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.