Britain Deleted Eleven Days 274 Years Ago Today — The Riot in Every Textbook Left No Record — Woody Magazine, Sept. 14, 2026
Britain Deleted Eleven Days 274 Years Ago Today — The Riot in Every Textbook Left No Record
The day after Sept. 2, 1752, was Sept. 14. The angry mob arrived much later.
- Britons who went to bed on Sept. 2, 1752, woke the next morning on Sept. 14. Eleven days were gone from the calendar.
- The mob shouting for those eleven days made it into the encyclopedias. No record from that year shows it.
- This is not a claim that nobody objected. The complaints survive. Only the riot is missing.
Every workplace has the story about the accident. It comes up in orientation. It comes up when somebody asks why a rule is so strict. Ask when it happened, or to whom, and the answer goes soft. The person telling you heard it from someone else.
British history has one of those. It started 274 years ago today.
Britons who went to bed on Sept. 2, 1752, woke the next morning on Sept. 14. Eleven days were gone from the calendar. That part is true. What almost always follows is the second half: crowds filled the streets shouting "Give us our eleven days," convinced that Parliament had cut eleven days off their lives.
You can see why it sticks. Wake up to a date that has jumped eleven days and you would feel robbed too. It is easy to assume people in 1752 understood calendars less well than we do. I believed it for years.
Go looking for the riot, though, and nothing turns up.
The Julian calendar slipped a day every 128 years
The calendar Julius Caesar fixed in 46 B.C. counted a year as 365.25 days. That runs about 11 minutes longer than the time the sun takes to return to the same point. Eleven minutes is nothing across a single year. Across 128 years it becomes a whole day.
For the church this was an operations problem. Easter is set from the spring equinox, and the equinox on the calendar kept drifting away from the equinox in the sky. Pope Gregory XIII corrected the calendar in 1582. Catholic countries adopted it almost at once.
England did not. The objection was that a pope had written it. England held out for 170 years, and the gap grew from ten days to eleven.
The push to fix it did not come from the government. An astronomer did the arithmetic: George Parker, Earl of Macclesfield. James Bradley, the astronomer royal, rebuilt the Easter tables. Philip Stanhope, the Earl of Chesterfield, carried the bill into the House of Lords. It was a private member's bill.
Chesterfield wrote to his son about it a few weeks afterward. He had memorized astronomical terms he did not understand, delivered them, and then heard colleagues thank him for making the whole thing so clear. The Lords passed the bill without debate. It received royal assent on May 22, 1751.
The act is titled "An Act for regulating the Commencement of the Year, and for correcting the Calendar now in Use." Section 1 sets the date. Count as usual through Sept. 2, 1752, then call the next day Sept. 14.
The law dealt with rent and interest first
For the lost-wages story to hold, the act would have to leave that question open. It does not. Section 6 is that question, start to finish.
Rent. Money owed under any contract. The start and end of leases. Delivery dates. The handing over of land. All of it stays on "the same respective natural days." The names on the dates moved. The actual days between them did not. Rent due at Michaelmas, Sept. 29, fell due on Oct. 10 under the section as written. No landlord could collect eleven days early.
Interest is plainer still. A borrower owes interest only for "the true number of natural days" the principal went unpaid. The calendar jumped. The interest did not.
This was not a clause buried at the back. It takes up a whole section, one long sentence that names every kind of payment in turn. Whatever the rioters were supposed to be angry about, the act had dealt with it that same year.
The trouble showed up on market days
None of which means the year passed quietly. The disruption was real. It simply was not wages.
A country year ran on fairs and feast days. A fair at Michaelmas, another on St. Thomas's Day, work set down at Christmas. The act moved those to natural days as well, and the order came apart.
On Sept. 15, 1753, Jackson's Oxford Journal ran a notice about the fairs at Charlbury. The fair once held Sept. 29 would be held Oct. 10. The fair once held on St. Thomas's Day, Dec. 21, would be held Jan. 1. The second line was the trouble. That fair had always come four days before Christmas. Under the new calendar, Christmas came a week before it.
So a great many people kept Christmas on the old date. Jan. 5 on the new calendar was Dec. 25 on the old one. That is where the phrase Old Christmas comes from.
The complaints survive. In 1753 the MP Robert Nugent told the Commons how this worked. He had backed the naturalization of foreign Protestants, and after that people blamed him for every measure they disliked. They said he had written the calendar act. An old woman, he reported, remarked that it was no wonder the man would naturalize the devil, since he was one of those who banished Old Christmas.
When Bradley lay dying, people were calling his illness a judgment for meddling with the calendar. The man who wrote that down was S. P. Rigaud, who collected Bradley's papers and set out his life seventy years after he died. People complained all the same, and fair enough. But complaining and rioting are different, and the riot is the part that is missing.
The banner is on the floor
We remember this riot as a picture rather than a text. Follow the sources back and you land on one painting.
William Hogarth finished "An Election Entertainment" in 1755. It is the first of four, and it shows the Oxfordshire election of 1754.
You need that election to read the picture. Oxfordshire was one of the last Tory strongholds, and the campaign ran eighteen months. One of the Whig candidates was Thomas Parker. His father was the Earl of Macclesfield, the man who had done the calendar arithmetic. Parker himself had chaired the committee stage of the bill in the Commons. The Tories could hardly have asked for more.
Their campaign songs survive. He has altered our time, ran one of them, so let him be turned out like Old Christmas. The new calendar was a popish import, and the Whigs were the pope's friends.
The picture holds that election. Bricks come through the window. A man in a wig has been knocked flat. A banner lies on the floor, and the words on it are "Give Us Our Eleven Days."
The historian Robert Poole reads the painting this way. No record puts Hogarth in Oxfordshire at the time, and none rules it out either. He certainly knew the squibs and ballads circulating in London. The slogan in the picture is not something he saw. It is something he wrote.
Poole went through the record as well: riot depositions at the Public Record Office, ministers' papers, newspapers, periodicals. Neither the passage of the act nor its commencement produced a calendar riot. Three researchers had reached the same point before him, separately, and they agree the riot did not happen. In 1954 H. Watkins chased the stories of riots in London and Bristol and came back with nothing. Paul Alkon, in a 1982 journal article, got there too. They part company after that. Alkon found the reform smooth and uncontroversial. Poole disagrees.
Poole states the limit himself. You cannot prove an absence. But the side making the claim carries the burden, and in two centuries nobody has met it.
York, March 1820
The riot became a fact in a courtroom.
On Aug. 16, 1819, some 60,000 people gathered at St. Peter's Field in Manchester to demand parliamentary reform. Cavalry rode into the crowd and eighteen people died. The name that stuck was Peterloo, a bitter play on Waterloo.
The following March, ten men including the orator Henry Hunt stood trial at York, charged with conspiring to overthrow the government. James Scarlett, prosecuting on the northern circuit, produced Hogarth's picture for the jury.
His argument ran like this. When the calendar lost eleven days, ignorant people believed their lives had been shortened and demanded the days back, and Hogarth exposed the folly. That is what a crowd is. The defendants therefore knew what would happen when they gathered one.
That is the first statement to treat the riot as established, and Scarlett's evidence was a painting. Hunt was convicted of seditious conspiracy and served thirty months in Ilchester prison. In court he threw the phrase back. The defendants had been held eleven days and nights, he said, and he wanted those eleven sweet days of liberty returned.
What got added later
Nine years on, in 1829, William Coxe wrote in his memoirs of the Pelham administration that the populace had shown "tumultuary indications." That is the first account anyone set down on purpose. His source was the painting too.
In 1845 Augustus De Morgan added a scene. He taught mathematics at London University and wrote for the almanac of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. In his account the mob chases a minister's carriage, demanding the return of their shortened lives. The carriage appears here for the first time.
In 1848 C. R. Weld copied De Morgan almost word for word into the official history of the Royal Society. In the 1870s W. E. H. Lecky carried it into his bestselling history of the eighteenth century. Past that point the story stopped being something to check and became something to cite.
It entered the Oxford History of England in 1939, and the Britannica entry on the calendar in the 1970s. G. J. Whitrow's "Time in History," published by Oxford in 1987, added more. The worst rioting was in Bristol, he wrote, where several people were killed. Where that number came from is not recorded.
Whitrow's paragraph is the strangest place in the whole story. Right after describing workers who rioted believing they would lose eleven days' pay, he opens a parenthesis to note that the act had been carefully worded to prevent any injustice over rents and interest. The correction and the myth sit in the same paragraph.
Britannica now runs its own piece taking the riot apart, and notes that its own 15th edition was carrying the story as late as 1976. A history channel's website still carries an article headlined "The Calendar Riots of 1752."
Trace the story and a use turns up every time. In the 1820 courtroom it was an argument for conviction. In the 1845 almanac it showed why science mattered. In Lecky's history it proved the world had improved. A stupid crowd was a handy thing to keep on the shelf.
The workplace accident has no name and no date for the same reason. Write the name down and someone can look it up. Look it up and you can no longer use it. The crowd demanding its eleven days survived the same way. Nobody ever wrote down who they were.
- Source ↗ Calendar (New Style) Act 1750 (24 Geo. 2 c. 23), full text, legislation.gov.uk (The National Archives). Section 1 on the date change and Section 6 on rent, interest and leases
- Source ↗ Robert Poole, "Give us our eleven days!", chapter 1 of "Time's Alteration: Calendar Reform in Early Modern England" (UCL Press, 1998), expanding his 1995 article in Past and Present
- Source ↗ "Did a Calendar Change Cause Riots in England?", Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Source ↗ "'Time, that great discoverer of truth and falsehood': the calendar change of 1752", The History of Parliament
- Source ↗ "The Gregorian Calendar Adopted in England", History Today
- Source ↗ Title page of the 1820 trial report of Henry Hunt and others (T. Dolby, 1820), University of Leeds Special Collections
- Source ↗ "SCARLETT, James (1769-1844)", The History of Parliament Online
- Robert Poole, "Peterloo: The English Uprising," Oxford University Press, 2019 (Peterloo death toll)
- G. J. Whitrow, "Time in History," Oxford University Press, 1987
- S. P. Rigaud, "Miscellaneous Works and Correspondence of James Bradley," Oxford, 1832
- Cobbett's Parliamentary History, vol. 15 (Nugent's remarks, 1753)
- Jackson's Oxford Journal, Sept. 15, 1753 (Charlbury fair notice)
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