English history

For 600 years of English history, today was New Year’s Day.

On the Christian calendar, today is the Feast of the Annunciation. Exactly nine months before Christmas, this is the day Christians have historically celebrated the angel Gabriel’s announcement of the Incarnation to the Virgin Mary (i.e., that she would become pregnant and give birth to the miraculously conceived Messiah/Son of God). In England the feast day was called Our Lady’s Day—eventually popularly shortened to Lady Day.

Lady Day was one of the four English quarter-days, the others being Midsummer Day (June 24), Michaelmas Day (September 29), and Christmas (December 25). The quarter-days roughly coincide with the solstices and equinoxes, and therefore with the change of seasons.

Lady Day was a time of renewal. It marked the beginning of the agricultural season. It was the date leases expired and were renewed. It was the day servants and workers were paid and hired. It was the day fires and candles were extinguished—from Lady Day to Michaelmas Day no candles were used in a home and no fires were lit other than in the kitchen. Because it was the first of the quarter-days, Lady Day was also New Year’s Day.

In 1750, by act of Parliament, England adopted and began transitioning to the Gregorian Calendar. As part of that transition, New Years Day was moved from March 25 to January 1. In accordance with the transition, March 24, 1750 was followed by March 25, 1751 (as usual), but December 31, 1751 was followed by January 1, 1752—so that 1751 was shortened to a little over 9 months, January changed from being the eleventh month of the year to being the first month of the year, and January 1 replaced March 25 (“Lady Day”) as New Years Day.

The Annunciation has been a popular subject in Western art. The image is Sandro Botticelli’s “Cestello Annunciation” (1489), which is in the Santa Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi in Florence.