The Beginning of the Wars of the Roses? By Catherine Hokin

Anyone who cares about history is obsessed with dates. We locate rulers with them. We decide what's historical and what's too close to our own lifetime to dare creep into that camp with them. As historical fiction writers we frequently weep over them and wish we could smudge a birth date here or a battle there to make our plot lines work. But how many, to borrow a phrase from 1066 and All That, can we trust are genuine - is it, as Misters Sellars and Yeatman would have it, really only two, reduced from four as two weren't memorable?

 Warren Field Lunar Calendar: University of Birmingham

Trying to keep track of the time goes back almost to the dawn of it. The first formulized calendars date from the Bronze Age, but the title of 'world's oldest calendar', awarded in 2013 (more than three sources quote this date so I'm going to accept it) goes to an arrangement of twelve pits and an arc in Warren Field, Scotland which is approximately 10,000 years old. The oldest-still-in-use award is claimed by the Jewish calendar which was introduced in the ninth century BC. 

 The Lost 11 Days: Today in History

Baked into the development of all our measuring systems is the differing lunar year (354 days) and solar year (365 days). The Roman Calendar, 45 BC, introduced the concept of leap years to try and solve this mismatch. By the time the Gregorian Calendar was floated in 1582, the Roman's miscalculation of the solar year had thrown the seasons, and therefore Easter, out of sync. Pope Gregory's attempts to solve this involved changing the leap year system to a new calculation based on years divisible by four rather than an extra day every four years. Or something on those lines that defies my understanding. Anyway it obviously worked because, as we all know, Easter is now an immovable feast. Not everyone liked the changes: Germany resisted the swap until 1700 and England, as warm then to the idea of European regulations as it ever was, stuck it out on the old system until 1752. By this point the seasons were so messed up, Parliament took the rather fabulous decision to advance the year overnight from September 2nd to September 14th, thus removing 11 days at a stroke. Take all this into account and is it any wonder that the dates we choose as significant can sometimes feel more like a collective act of will than a fixed and certain point?

 Assassination of Franz Ferdinand

Which brings me back, finally, to where you might have thought this article was going: the beginning of the Wars of the Roses. Dating the start of conflicts is always a troublesome thing. I remember my confusion at school after being initially taught that dates were absolute and then being introduced to the Hundred Years War. Rounding down its extra 16 years seemed to offend both the laws of History and Maths. That the conflict was a series of wars and didn't even attract that name until the nineteenth century was a revelation left for university, by which time I was, luckily, a more cynical creature. If the Thirty Years war lasted longer than the 1618-1648 timeline given to it, I don't want to know.

Perhaps the problem goes back to our need to define the reasons for a key event in a way that can be regurgitated in an exam format. Four causes good, one cause even better. The start date for WWI is recorded across all common sources as 28 July 1914, when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. If asked, I would guess most people would state the main cause as the assassination of Franz Ferdinand - or, as Baldrick so beautifully puts it in Blackadder Goes Forth, when 'Archie Duke shot an ostrich because he was hungry'. That act has become our shorthand for all the colonial and dynastic disputes that went before. Similarly we start WWII on 1 September 1939 with its blitzkrieg images rather than the 1938 Anschluss, or the 1933 Nazi rise to power, or the end of WWI...  Obviously only the world's biggest bore would refuse to accept the commonly-agreed answer and we'd soon lose the pub quiz and all our mates if we disputed every date. The narrative of remembering is however, as always, in the victors' hands.

 Henry VI Part One

Today, May 22nd, is the anniversary of the First Battle of St Albans, fought between the rival houses of York and Lancaster in 1455 and commonly given as the starting point for the Wars of the Roses. The battle itself was a short-lived thing, lasting less than an hour and without major casualties (in context of the engagements that would follow), apart from Edmund Beaufort, Earl of Somerset who was killed. Its consequences, however, were widespread. The alignment of Somerset with the House of Lancaster led not only to his but to the death of all his male heirs, ending the House of Beaufort. The bravery displayed by the Earl of Warwick began the myth-building around him which led to his 'kingmaker' title and his later over-reaching. King Henry VI's capture paved the way for the Duke of York to reclaim his position as Protector of England and take again the controlling hand over the kingdom the Lancastrians had only just seized back following the King's prolonged period of physical and mental incapacitation. And the Yorkists won, so they liked to remember it.

The battle started the openly bloody phase but it did not start the civil war. The origins of that go back to the eleventh century and the first Plantagenet king, Henry II, and his battling brood. No one sat comfortable on the throne for two hundred years and then, in 1399, the key split came: the deposition of Richard II by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV. That particular tussle split an already hostile family into two competing branches (the Lancastrians following Henry's line and the Yorkists from Richard) and the original Game of Thrones began. What finally tipped the dynastic feuding into full-blown conflict? A weak king. The saintly Henry VI with his catatonic illness was, by any measure, unfit to rule. Pair that with a strong man in opposition (Richard, Duke of York), a Queen with a long-awaited heir and no intention of relinquishing power (Margaret of Anjou) and all the fortunes tied up in aristocratic privilege and it's little surprise that a war erupted. And our shorthand for all that is the First Battle of St Albans. (And yes, I appreciate that's a whirlwind tour but there's a lot more detail in my novel, just saying). Perhaps the next question should be when did the civil war end? Easy: 1485 and the Battle of Bosworth. Except, of course, it didn't - the ramifications were still shaking the throne when the Tudors climbed on it. 

Mary Beard's Twitter Challenge

Causes and dates. We need them to make sense of where we are in the world and what brought us here but they aren't always reliable. A few months ago, Mary Beard asked her followers on Twitter to set future exam questions on what got us to Brexit. The answers were depressingly entertaining. A Level, 2069: Summarise the latest plan for Britain to exit the EU. Discuss the shifting relationship between Britain and Europe, using examples from 6200 BCE, 55 BCE, 43 CE, 410 CE, 865, 1066, 1534 and 2016-2019. To what extent did Brexit mean Brexit? My particular favourite was the short and to the point: When did Brexit End? Hopefully we can all agree on a date to that soon.

A new year by Mary Hoffman

Reading Julie Summers' post a few days ago about New Year's Resolutions gave me pause for thought. I'm not a great maker of resolutions myself, though I remember making comprehensive lists of potential improvements as a child and young teenager. Perhaps I was a bit like Jane Austen's Emma, of whom Mr Knightley says:

"Emma has been meaning to read more ever since she was twelve years old. I have seen a great many lists of her drawing-up at various times of books that she meant to read regularly through--and very good lists they were--very well chosen, and very neatly arranged--sometimes alphabetically, and sometimes by some other rule. The list she drew up when only fourteen--I remember thinking it did her judgment so much credit, that I preserved it some time; and I dare say she may have made out a very good list now. But I have done with expecting any course of steady reading from Emma. She will never submit to any thing requiring industry and patience, and a subjection of the fancy to the understanding."

In other words, the making of a list is nothing if the tasks on the list are not carried out.

But today I want to think about the New Year rather than the resolutions.

I was recently writing about the moment when 1299 became 1300 and trying to think of what it might mean to a young girl in medieval Italy. She was the heroine of my new novel for Barrington Stoke, due out later this month and called Tilt:

I was blithely putting myself in Netta's shoes, as the daughter of an architect and stonemason working on the bell tower for Pisa's cathedral, when I suddenly had to smack myself on the head and say "Doh!" Because of course Netta's new year did NOT begin on 1st January but on 25th March.

That is of course the date of the Annunciation of the angel Gabriel to Mary and in Italy THAT was when the year 1300 began, as it did for much of mainland Europe. It wasn't until 1521 that the new year in Tuscany began on the first day of January. And in England that change was not made until 1752.

(Yet Scotland adopted the new date in 1600 - could this be why the Scots are so attached to Hogmanay, since they've been celebrating it on the night before 1st January for over four hundred years?)

The Romans began their year in March too, without reference to the BVM. Hence September, October, November and December, named as the seventh, eighth, nine and tenth months respectively.*

Before it got its status as the year opener, 1st January was celebrated in the Gregorian calendar as the Circumcision and Naming of Christ, a minor festival which is still technically acknowledged on that date in the Anglican Church.

Bartolomeo Veneto Circumcision of Christ 1506  Louvre

The tradition of showing the new year as a baby goes back a long way. This 16th century woodcut carries the Latin couplet:

"sum novus ut pura puer ortus virgine Christus.
Sic tibi sit foelix hic novus annus. homo."

(I am as new as Christ child born of a virgin pure,
Mortal, may your new year be just as happy and sure.)

The child ages throughout the year, becoming as old as Father Time by the last day of December, ready to hand over to another new baby. Many images seem to equate Old Father Time with Death himself, since he comes with a scythe.

And you could be forgiven for thinking that 2016 has certainly reaped a rich harvest of souls, though statisticians tell us we are wrong about that. From David Bowie's unexpected death on January 10th to the passing of Debbie Reynolds on December 29th, the infant 2016 had to age very quickly.

January used to be called Lautomaand by the Dutch, meaning "frosty month" and was dubbed Nivose or "snow month" in the French Revolutionary calendar. Unless the weather changes quickly in my neck of the woods, I shall think of it as "fog month."

"Mist monath" might make the month seem a little more attractive; I gather many people hate January and regard it as 31 days to be endured.

I'm not one of them. I love new beginnings: first of the month, first month of the year, first day of term, first page of a new novel - to read or to write -  first birthdays of babies. And the turn of the year, which started with the winter solstice on 21st December, really gets going today.

The sol is invictus, even by the Oxfordshire fog.

A very happy New Year to all our readers and Followers around the world.

* History Girl Caroline Lawrence disagrees here.

Mary Hoffman's 2017 books are:

January Tilt (Barrington Stoke)
February Walking on Water and Lost and Found (Otter-Barry Books)
April The Ravenmaster's Boy (Greystones Press) and When she was Bad (as Amy Lovell, Greystones Press)
September Pirate Baby (Otter-Barry Books)

Dating 101, by Laurie Graham

Writing about pre-Revolutionary Russia (as I’ve been doing recently) I’ve had to deal with calendar complications. I’m no stranger to them. For several years I belonged to an Orthodox parish under the direct rule of the Moscow Patriarchate, a church that adheres to the Julian Calendar. The USSR adopted the Gregorian Calendar in 1918, by order of the Council of People’s Commissars, but the church clung and still clings to its old ways. If, like me, numbers make you feel dizzy, it can be very testing, but history is full of calendar anomalies. We just have to get our heads around them.

The problem with the Julian calendar is that its calculations are slightly inaccurate. Little by little it lags behind the solar year. It is currently 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar which is why Russian children living in Ireland are expected to celebrate Christmas on January 7^th, just as the new school term begins. But I digress. The Gregorian calendar, more accurate in its calculations, was instituted in 1582 and taken up very quickly by Catholic countries, then more gradually by Protestant states. For a while dates were written in both styles, with the Gregorian date above and the Julian date below. The United Kingdom and America didn’t make the switch until 1752. Turkey and Greece were among the last to hold out, not converting until 1920s.

So far, so good.  But there’s more. January 1^st was not always marked as the beginning of a new year. Far from it. Before the Norman Conquest the winter solstice signalled the year’s end in England. The Normans introduced January 1st as the start of a new year but by the middle of the 12^th century that fell from use too. Lady Day, which is March 25^th and the Feast of the Annunciation, became New Year’s Day and so it remained until 1752. The calendar used to run as follows, March 24^th 1666, March 25^th 1667 etc.  But not, nota bene, in Scotland. In 1600 Scotland, still an independent kingdom, opted to make January 1st its New Year’s Day.

Still with me?   

In 1752 Parliament passed the Calendar Act. It was a nifty two-step change to convert the United Kingdom and her colonies to the Gregorian calendar once and for all.

Step 1: It was decreed that the year 1752 would end on December 31^st instead of on the following March 25^th, thereby lopping nearly three months off the year.

Step 2: A further eleven days were removed from the month of September to bring us into line with the Gregorian calendar. One day it was September 2^nd, next day it was September 14^th.

1752 was a very short year and as you may imagine, when the next Lady Day came round and rents and taxes were due people objected. They felt they were being robbed of time. Well in a sense they were. So the Exchequer said, ‘Okay, we’ll give you eleven days grace.’ And because there was an intervening Sunday, April 6^th was fixed as the start of the new tax year. Which is where it has remained to this very day.

So now you know. Just call me Wrassles-with-Calendars