ABERDEEN-L Archives

From: Gavin Bell <>
Subject: [ABERDEEN] Re:[ANGUS] Date Confusion
Date: Sun, 14 Sep 2003 11:44:44 +0100

Charley wrote:

> ...
> Roman Catholic countries [Europe, South America, etc]
> adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1582
> ...
> England and its colonies used March 25th
> as the beginning of the year until 1752.

Indeed they did. But Scotland didn't, because it was an independent
kingdom until 1603, when the King of Scotland became King of England as
well (or, as he preferrd to put it, King of Great Britain).

Scotland had, in fact, adopted part of the Gregorian calendar reforms in
1600, in that January 1st then became the start of the New Year, so the
whole business of dual dating simply does not apply in Scotland (except,
in theory, between 1582 and 1600). That still left the problem of the
11 days, which was resolved in 1752, by Act of the parliament of Great
Britain.

My information on this came from a website maintained by Mike Spathaky.
I haven't checked recently to see if it's still there, but it was at:

http://www.genfair.com/dates.htm

Note that "Legacy" is not alone in failing to realise that Scottish
dates (between 1600 and 1752) are different from English dates over the
same period. Beware also of most of the "weekday calculators" you will
find online. They, too, mostly refer to the English situation. I did,
based on Mike Spathaky's data, produce an Excel spreadsheet which would
correctly work out the day of the week for Scottish dates from 1600
onwards, but have never got round to doing something similar online.


Gavin Bell

This thread:

• by "Charley Kyd" <>
  • by "Charley Kyd" <>
  • Re:[ABERDEEN] by Gavin Bell <>
    • Re: Re:[ABERDEEN] by "eileen VASA" <>