April 23rd: Celebrate Dates: Don’t Always Trust Them!

 by Mark Richardson

As I am sure you already know, tomorrow is April 23rd. You may also know that it’s St George’s Day. Finally, you might have been told that it marks Shakespeare’s birthday. Dates have an attraction. How amazing that an ordinary date is both that of the English patron saint while at the same time Shakespeare’s day too: two English institutions for the price of one! But when you get closer to dates, they get more, well, slippery, as you shall see.

Let’s focus on Shakespeare. April 23rd is the date he died, according to his monument in the parish church, Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon. But what about his birth? When we look at his baptismal record in the register of that church, we see that he was baptised on the 26th of April, so he COULD have been born on April 23rd. But he could have been born on the 22nd too: it just wouldn’t have been so neat, so special. Whatever, speed was of the essence: the possibility of infant death was painfully real at the time, sharpened by the fear that an unbaptised child might not ascend to heaven.

Here’s the entry in the baptismal register:

Hard to read, true. Here’s a typed version: “Guilielmus filius Johannes Shakspere” (ie “William son of John Shakespeare”) His burial was recorded in the same register, this time entered as “Will Shakspere gent”. (He was born in Latin but buried in English!) As you can see, in the left hand margin there’s the date of baptism, ie 26. We can see it’s April, because a little higher in the margin is “il”, the ending of the word April.

But wait: have another look at that part of the register:

What’s sticking out above the end of the word “April”? It’s “64”, with the rest of the date hidden by the tight binding of the register. But there’s something else there: a horizontal line across the page, drawn immediately and delightfully haphazardly below the year. Why the year and line there? Because, quite simply, that’s when the new year began!

It’s complicated. The idea of the new year beginning on January 1st seems obvious to us, but it’s only been true in England since 1752, less than 300 years ago. Since the twelfth century England followed a tradition in common with most of Western Europe which in turn had been a practice of Ancient Rome of having March 25th as the beginning of the new year. While other European countries started to move towards using January 1st and then also adopting the new Gregorian calendar, England held on to its tradition, even while Scotland made the change in 1600!

So while it is true that Shakespeare was definitely born in 1564, if he had been born a month earlier he would have been born in 1563! Mind you, we would have changed the date to 1564, something historians have had to do with all of events that took place in the first three months of a year (which, of course, were the last three months of the year as far as people living in England pre-1752.

So, dates can be slippery. Mind you, there is one area of British life that still starts the new year according to the old rules: taxes. The start of the new tax year is at the beginning of April. Yes, I know that’s not March 25th, but when we changed back in 1752 to the new-fangled Gregorian calendar, (which was because the old calendar had caused a lot of slippage and we needed to keep up), 11 days had to be added to the existing calendar, so everyone woke up on Thursday 2nd September 1752 to find that it was now the 14th of September, which caused riots and cries of “give us back our 11 days!” By then the new year began in January, as for us, but taxes were still collected on March 25th, but now would be April 4th, which is still the same today.

So, celebrate dates, but remember: they just might not be exactly what they seem!