In the Christian calendar, Lady Day is the Feast of the Annunciation, which is the revelation to Mary, the mother of Jesus by the archangel Gabriel that she would conceive a child to be born the Son of God. Lady Day is celebrated on March 25 exactly nine months before Christmas.
From the Genealogist point of view Lady Day was the most important day in the English calender until 1752 as it was New Year’s Day and the first of the four traditional Irish and English quarter days when rents and taxes were paid and the time of hiring fairs when servants put themselves up for employment.
As you look at Parish Registers, you will note that the entries for the year begin Mar 25th, and in transcriptions prior to 1752 you often see the previous three months written as 1732/3 for example.
The rest of Europe, including Scotland, had changed from the Julian Calender to the Gregorian Calendar, named after Pope Gregory, during the time of Henry VIII, and by 1752 the English were 11 days behind the rest of Europe. So in that year, to bring them in line with everyone else, 11 days were dropped from the Calendar in September and New Years Day moved to January 1.
There was apparently some rioting in the streets because the government had stolen ten days of everyones lives. Although it could have been due to the tax man, who to ensure a full twelve month’s taxes added the lost days to the date of Lady Day and declared the Tax year to start on April 6, which it still does.
Just in case you think that this was England coming out of the middle ages. The same calender applied to all England’s Dominions which of course included Canada and USA at the time. And we weren’t the last to change. In Europe that was Greece in 1923.
