Earlier this year, newspaper headlines warned people claiming a state pension that they had until 5th April to get “as much free government money as possible.” Depending on your viewpoint, the UK is either charmingly idiosyncratic or infuriatingly obstructive in not ending its tax year on 31st December, as other countries do. So how did it become such an outlier?
It all began with the Romans. All calendars are plagued by an astronomical inconvenience: the earth takes slightly longer than 365 days to complete its annual orbit around the sun, which means that without fine-tuning the human year becomes out of step with the seasons. Julius Caesar tried to solve this problem by introducing an extra leap day every four years, but that was a slight over-compensation—and so as the centuries passed, important days such as the equinoxes (where day and night are of equal length) and the full moon were slipping back. Because Church astronomers used those natural events to calculate the date of Easter, it was becoming increasingly difficult to reconcile the behaviour of the heavens with the ecclesiastical calendar. In 1582, Pope Gregory decided to restore harmony by deleting ten days and then permanently reducing the frequency of leap years by three every 400 years.
Then, as now, bureaucratic mandates from Europe were perceived as a threat to our national liberty, and Protestant England refused to accept the sensible Catholic reforms. Their resistance brought unfortunate consequences: in 1598, Easter Sunday fell on April Fools’ Day in countries still adhering to the Julian system. The following year, when Shakespeare completed Julius Caesar to celebrate the opening of the new Globe Theatre, he slipped in a reference to the controversy. On the eve of Caesar’s assassination, Brutus seems confused about the date, asking “Is not to-morrow, boy, the first of March?” Apparently not, reports his servant: according to the calendar, it would be the 15th, the propitious Ides of March.
England fell further and further behind most of Europe. Further complicating matters, the legal year traditionally began not on 1st January, but on 25th March. That is Lady Day, which commemorates the Annunciation, when archangel Gabriel announced to Mary that she would become the mother of Christ. It was the first of four quarterly days when rents were due: the others were Midsummer’s Day, Michaelmas and Christmas.
At the end of the 17th century, Europe was a chaotic calendrical patchwork, because Russia and several Protestant countries were still resisting any imposition of Vatican control. Despite the clear benefits of being in line with the rest of the continent, London’s Royal Society—swayed by their chief mathematical expert, Isaac Newton—insisted on retaining the nation’s isolationist stance. Fervently anti-Catholic, Newton effectively shelved the question—although as a Christmas Day baby, perhaps he was influenced by his conviction of having been especially chosen by God. According to Europe’s Gregorian calendar, Newton was born not on 25th December 1642, but on 4th January 1643. And because the English year started in March, his baptism took place in January 1642, apparently before his own birth.
Half a century later, Newton was dead and religious objections carried less weight. The Earl of Macclesfield (aka Lord Parker), a distinguished astronomer who became president of the Royal Society, recommended that Britain’s calendar be altered in two ways: a one-off excision of 11 days, and by beginning every year on 1st January. These changes were implemented in 1752, but despite all the prevarications, nobody seems to have thought through the financial consequences. Perhaps it was just too daunting to contemplate how the due dates of salary payments and property transactions would have to be adjusted, especially after new ones began to be put in place. Treasury staff embarked on countless lengthy calculations, even rounding up fractions of a farthing to squeeze out maximum potential revenue before abandoning their attempts. Eventually, the decision was taken to retain the old-style quarterly days for the national accounts—but because the calendar had shifted by 11 days, the tax year now ended not in March but on 4thApril.
Unsurprisingly, confusion reigned for several years. Even genuine guidance sounded like a parody: “The FAIR formerly held on the 29th Day of September, will be holden on the 10th day of October. The fair formerly held on St Thomas’s Day will be holden on the first Day of January… The Fair formerly held on the second Friday in May, will be holden on the second Friday after Old May Day, unless when the 12th of May falls on a Friday, then to be holden on the Friday next following…” Although government legislation aimed to clamp down on opportunistic profiteering, people worried—with justification—that employers and merchants would find ways of short-changing them.
And while the calendar reform had gone through without any great objections from the opposition at the time, now it suited the Tories to lambast every Whig policy. During the elections of 1754, the Whig candidate in Oxfordshire was Lord Parker, son of the Earl of Macclesfield and chair of the Royal Society committee endorsing the calendar changes. That made him an ideal victim for a Tory lampoon:
“Our Time he has alter'd and turn'd it about,
So he like Old Christmas shall too be turned out”
William Hogarth’s painting An Election Entertainment (1755) contributed to longer-term chaos by fostering the urban myth that ignorant mobs had rioted to demand back their lost 11 days: supposedly, the uneducated masses were so stupid that they believed their lives would be shortened. Towards the bottom right of his painting, a Tory banner protesting “Give us our Eleven Days” is being trampled on.
Yet another adjustment was made in 1800. Because that year was not a leap year under the new Gregorian system, the Treasury added an extra day to make up for the lost 29th February, and the British tax year has ended on 5th April ever since. How might Hogarth have satirised recent newspaper advice to claim as much free money as possible before that apparently arbitrary date?
