Friday 14 September 2018

new style

This day for those subjects of the British Empire in 1752 was proceeded by the second of September due to the calendar reforms of the Chesterfield Act, ratified by Parliament two years prior.
The law synchronised the empire with most of the rest of the Western Europe that had adopted the Gregorian calendar in the late sixteenth century and also decreed that the new year began on the first of January instead of on Lady Day (the Feast of the Annunciation). Possibly exaggerated accounts of rioting with angry mobs demanding, “Give us our eleven days!” inspired cartoonist William Hogarth to satirise the partisan process with the lengthy and heated dispute between Whig and Tory members that prefaced passage.