MDDM Ch. 19 Summary, notes

[Dave Monroe]

Will hopefully get around to posting a little
something on that calendrical reform, but, in the
meantime, do see, e.g., ...

Poole, Robert.  Time's Alteration: Calendar Reform
   in Early Modern England.  London: Taylor &
   Francis, 1988.

Whittrow, G.J.  Time in History.
   New York: Oxford UP, 1988.

Steel, Duncan.  Marking Time: The Epic Quest to
   Invent the Perfect Calendar.  New York: John
   Wiley & Sons, 2000.

Steel, however, does make the egregious error of
referring to "The Ten Missing Days," despite noting
correctly that "For the Gregorian reform of 1582, the
ten dates which were jumped in Rome an other parts of
Italy ... were October 4-14 inclusive" (p. 167). 
Steel covers the eventual British adoption of the
Grgorian Calendar in Ch. 16, "Lord Chetserfield's Act
(A.D. 1751)," pp. 233-50 ...  

--- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
>  
> The disquisition which follows - fabulation and fact
> intermingled - is apparently Wicks's version of
> Mason's tale of Macclesfield and Bradley's
> conversation about the "regiment" of "Asiatick
> Pymies" who were hired "to colonize th' Eleven
> Days." 

> 190.6 "Macclesfield and that gang, that stole the
> Eleven Days right off the
> Calendar"
> 
> http://www.lexscripta.com/articles/actof1751.html
> 
> http://www.lexscripta.com/articles/calendar.html
>
>
http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~insrisg/nature/nw97/stolen_time.html
 
And, without having Mason & Dixon at hand ...

> 198.3 "the Defenestration of the Clothiers in '56"
> Seems to be a reference to a real historical
> incident from the history of Luddism, though I
> couldn't locate anything other than oblique
> references to it

There were calendar riots in England in 1752 ...

"Some workers actuially believed they were going to
lose eleven days' pay.  So they rioted and emanded
'Give us back our eleven days!' (The Act of Parliament
had, in fact, been carefully worded so as to prevent
any injustice in the payments of rents, interest,
etc.)"

"For generations, there has been no better
illustration of the collective idiocy of the crowd
than the story of the English calendar riots of 1752."

Whitrow and Poole, respectively, quoted (if not quite
cited ...) by Steel, who also notes that the phrase
"Give us our eleven days!" shows up in a 1755 William
Hogarth engraving (which he declines to name or
reproduce; Wiley & Sons, by the way, also published
Edwin Danson's frustratingly-to-infuriatingly
undocumented Drawing the Line, must be the house style
...) ...

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