Ten Days Lost From the Calendar Forever

What if you went to sleep and woke up ten days later? It happened to millions of people in Europe in October of 1582, and some of them were quite upset about it.

It all had to do with problems in the calendar instituted 1,628 years before by the great Julius Caesar. The calendar of the times was just the tiniest bit off, and so the world lost eleven minutes per year, for over 1600 years. The spring equinox had drifted from March all the way into winter. Things were really a mess.

Pope Gregory XIII took matters into his own hands. He appointed a committee of calendar experts to examine the problem, and they suggested a more scientifically correct model. The Pope accepted their recommendations and issued a papal edict mandating the changes.

But to get things back on schedule, ten days had to be slashed. So on October 4, 1582 much of Western Europe went to sleep and woke up the next morning on October 15. The overall reaction was mixed. The citizens of Frankfurt, Germany, rioted against the pope, who they thought was trying to steal days from their lives. On the other hand, peasants living in isolated rural villages barely noticed at all.

Some countries didn’t accept the change for years, creating massive confusion. But eventually everyone let go of the missing days and adopted the Gregorian Calendar we still use today.

Pope Gregory was eighty years old when he fixed his signature on the papal edict thereby making changes to Caesar’s calendar. Those changes proved remarkably accurate: the Gregorian Calendar is off by only one day every three thousand years.

Protestant England rejected the new calendar and didn’t adopt it for over 170 years. When it finally did so, protesters took to the streets shouting, “Give us back our eleven days,” or chanting this anti-reform, anti-Catholic ditty:

“In seventeen hundred and fifty-three
The style it was changed to popery.”

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