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point the dating problems extend to the opening day and month for the cycles. Various Indictions attempted to regularise the position based on years beginning on 1st September, 24th September and on 25th December.

While all this was going on Easter was getting out of hand and arriving later and later in the year. Finally in 1582 Pope Gregory XIII issued a Papal Bull reforming the Julian Calendar. Leap years were set through to, and including, A.D. 2000. To achieve this 10 days were cut from the 1582 calendar, which went from 4th to 15th October.

Actually this merely added to the confusion as Gregory's Bull was not adopted by all countries in Europe at the same time. So even now, for dates subsequent to 1582 it is necessary to establish whether the Julian or Gregorian calendar was in use at the time and place of the date in question.

The Papal Bull of 1582 set the Christian New Year at 1st January but prior to that there were a variety of conventions for the start of the ecclesiastical New Year. Once again the lack of universal adoption means that New Year's Day continued to fall on a variety of dates depending on where you happened to be.

And then there were various views on the beginning of the ecclesiastical year.

The chronicler the Venerable Bede assumed that 25th December, as Christ's Nativity, was the natural beginning of the year.

Alternatives were adopted. Pisa, for example, up to 1750 used the 25th March preceding the 25th December, the Feast of the Annunciation.

England (and America) used 25th March after 25th December as New Year's Day only adopting 1st January in 1752 when switching from the Julian Calendar to the Gregorian Calendar in that year. This meant that 31st December 1751 was followed by 1st January 1752, so 1751 was a short year which ran from 25th March to 31st December. Then, in 1752, 2nd September was followed by 14th September. In the intervening 170 years since the Papal Bull 11 days jad to be removed from the Calendar to synchronise with the Gregorian dates. Scotland had adopted Gregorian Calendar in 1600.

Many citizens were not at all happy at the arbitrary loss in the days of their lives. First the short change out of the year of 1751 and then the loss of 11 days in September. The French did not fair much better when they attempted to introduce a decimal calendar at the time of the Revolution. They found that the Earth's c. 365 day orbit around the sun is not especially susceptible to decimalisation, nor, as it happens, was its citizenry.

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