February and the whole Leap Year thing.
or: Why February's the shortest month of the year, even with an extra day bolted onto the end.
If you think February gets short-changed by only being 28 or 29 days long, that's nothing. In 1751, February didn't happen at all in England, although it did happen in Scotland.
If you think I'm going to explain that, you'll have to wait, that's how this particular story ends. If we're going to get to the bottom of this leap year lark, I'll need to go back a shade further than the eighteenth century. It's a long story, and mildly interesting if you're into that sort of thing.
Right then, leap years. What's the point of them? And while we're at it, why is it that only February gets extended and how did that month come to be so short in the first place? As luck would have it, I have a theory. Just as well really, I've got a page to fill.
It's common knowledge that the Earth takes roughly 365¼ days to go round the sun, and as a calendar year runs ¼ day short, it's also common knowledge that we need to add a leap day every four years to balance things out. Piece of cake. As is always the way though, it's never quite as simple as that. It never is, is it?
The origins of the current calendar go back to roughly 753 BC, and quite frankly it was something of a cowboy job. Implemented by the Romans, it ran for ten months (namely March through December) of 30 or 31 days each, but there were only 304 days in total. The missing days still took place, but they were off the calendar. I mean it, those days still happened, but one year would finish, then you'd have a 60 day gap, then the next year would start. That's a bit bonkers if you ask me, but I don't make the rules.
Anyway, about 40 years later, a chap called Numa Pompilius became the King of Rome, which was nice for him. Amongst the things he put on his to-do list was getting down to the task of rebuilding the calendar, and to be honest, he didn't do too much better. He took a day off of all the previous 30 day months, which was a bit silly, but he also added two months to the end of the year, namely January and February. Now, that may sound stupid, but think about it Ð September, October, November and December literally mean "seventh, eight, ninth and tenth months" so he got it right at the time. It was some other muppet later on that cocked that bit up. Anyway, right from the off, February with its mere 28 days was the shortest month of the year, and as the last month to be added to the calendar it was always going to have to make do with whatever was left.
Even so, the calendar year was still 10 days shy of what it should've been, so an intercalary month was added every two or three years to keep things in line. The extra month was 27 days long, and rather greedily took the last few days of February for itself. You've got to feel for February, really. It's already the shortest month of the year and now it gets hacked down to 23 or 24 days by a mere part-timer. So why did the powers that be add the days after February instead of another month? Easy. February was the last month of the year, and the best time to add extra days to a year was right at the end. Obvious really, when you think about it. Now, all this sounds reasonably straightforward... if you like over-complicating things that is, and very few people like to over-complicate things more than politicians. Here they come, then. It was the politicians who decided when the intercalary month was put into the calendar, even though they risked messing things up if they moved it around... so they moved it around. They held it back or put it in later than scheduled in order to keep their mates in office longer or to force their enemies out early and even worse, sometimes they only announced the leap month with a few days notice, meaning that half the time, people genuinely didn't know what day it was. It was all a bit of a shambles, truth be told, and something had to give.
Now, you wouldn't think it from his memorable turn in Carry On Cleo, but Julius Caesar was the bloke who finally set the calendar on the right track. Mind you, he had his work cut out. By 46 BC, the calendar was 80 days out of whack, so Caesar decided to make that year 445 days long to bring it into line. That was a start, and for his next trick he abolished the intercalary month, spreading the spare days between the months of the year... well, apart from you know who. Poor old February missed out again. However, he wasn't entirely heartless. Possibly in recognition of the month's previously hard done by status, he added a leap day to the end of the month, to occur every four years without exception... oh, and along with January, he moved it to the start of the year. That's right, Julius Caesar is the muppet who made the names of the months meaningless. No wonder they all had it in for him. Still, the main thing was that the Julian Calendar was up and running.
Of course, things are never quite as simple as they appear, and even though the calendar appeared to be sorted out, in actual fact it wasn't. When I said a year was roughly 365¼ days, I meant just that. It's not a precise science, so over the course of time, it became clear that the seasons were still drifting off schedule, but at a much slower rate than before. It turned out that the calendar was basically sound, but that there had been too many leap years Ð all those extra February 29ths had meant that the year was starting ten days later than it should've. Some people are never happy, and one of those people was Pope Gregory XIII. Yup, another bloke with the clout to make things happen. As it happens, he was rather a big fan of Easter, and was not at all pleased that said festival was moving out of line with the vernal equinox, so when a chap called Aloysius Lilius came up with a plan to fix the calendar once and for all, the Pope was all ears. Especially when he found out the new calendar was going to be named after him.
This was the plan to fix the calendar Ð
1. Change the leap years so that the centuries are only leap years if they're divisible by 400 (so 1900 and 2100 aren't leap years, but 2000 is and was).
2. Take ten days out of the calendar to bring things back into line.
3. And relax.
And that was that. 4 October 1582 was immediately followed by 15 October and in one fell swoop, the calendar was sorted. Well, sort of. Here in Britain, you know what we're like, we never like to join in with the rest of Europe. Which brings me back to the first statement I made...
Back in 1751, February didn't happen. In fact, neither did January or the first 24 days of March, for that matter. Up until 1752, us Brits went by the old-style Julian calendar, and to make things even more awkward, in those days the English year started on 25 March, so 24 March 1750 would be immediately followed by 25 March 1751. I know, it's mad, but it worked. Mind you, the Scottish moved their New Year to 1 January way back in 1600, so at least they were half right. Trouble is, the rest of the world was already playing with their shiny new Gregorian calendar, and as a result by the time we joined in we were 11 days behind most other countries (thanks to us having a leap year in 1700), which made things interesting. You could write a letter in France, post it and it'd arrive in England days before you'd written it. This clearly wasn't working, so the Government decided to switch over to the new calendar, and the two biggest things that happened were that 11 days were taken out of September 1752 to bring us into line with everyone else (2 September was followed by 14 September, which must've annoyed anyone who had a birthday between those dates), but more importantly, the start of the year was shifted forward from 25 March to 1 January. This made 1751 the shortest year in history, as it only ran from 25 March to 31 December, and THAT is why February 1751 never existed. So now you know what the score is, both with leap years and February being the shortest month. Isn't that nice?
PS. If you think the British changeover was cack-handed, that's nothing compared to Sweden. They tried to correct their calendar by not any having leap days for a 40 year period... but after successfully ignoring the first leap year in 1700, they were a bit busy fighting the Great Northern War and forgot to ignore the next two. In the end, they made such a mess of things that they had to have a 30th February in 1712 just to restore the calendar to the way it was before. They finally changed over five months after the British, and a mere 12 years after they originally planned to do so. Makes our changeover look positively efficient.
Reproduced with awfully kind permission from MeltingPot Media. ©2008 Simon Darnell.
