I don’t know whether it’s a boy thing, but I’ve always been fascinated with clocks and calendars and time generally; apparently I learnt to tell the time before I was four, driving my mother nearly stoddy in the process. Laid up by a nasty cold I dug out and re-read this favourite of mine from twenty years ago.
Here is the history of all the different calendars, how time and the year was measured, and how all of this gradually became more accurate, as amendments and corrections were applied. I recall being astonished when I read – at the age of about nine – in The Guinness Book of Records about the longest year ever, with 445 days in it (46BC when Julius Caesar reformed the calendar). There is the complicated business of the difference between the year as measured by the stars and our ordinary year measured by the sun (and moon by some).
The key issue for the Christian Church was being able to accurately decide the date of Easter, which is not as easy as some would imagine: the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox sounds clear enough until you realise that the day of the vernal equinox and the full moon can vary depending on whereabouts on the planet you happen to be… And, at the time when it was originally laid down (Council of Nicaea, 325CE, if you must know) no-one had the means of measuring or calculating anything that accurately. At some point even later, back calculations to work out when Christ was born were also inaccurate, which is why he was actually born in 4BC (or 5BC or 6BC perhaps).
Calculations were terribly limited until the Indians and Arabs came up with a numeral system that used a zero, allowing decimals to replace inaccurate fractions, which everyone just used to round away, with predictable results. And yet the Church was always suspicious or afraid of new knowledge because it represented a challenge to orthodoxy.
Things improved in the 14thcentury with the invention of the mechanical clock and the possibility of measuring hours accurately. The Gregorian calendar was devised and implemented in the Catholic world in 1582, but not in Protestant lands, which eventually and gradually fell into line, England not agreeing until 1752. So years got mismatched owing to an 11-day discrepancy and the fact that our new year began on March 25 while other countries were already using 1 January. So, in what year was Charles I beheaded? Was that 30 January 1648 or 1649? It’s all relative, of course…
The subject – as you’ll gather from above – fascinates me, and there’s a lot of information in this book, but I do have to bemoan the incredibly shoddy editing and proof-reading which produces some truly bizarre errors: travelling east from London to get to Oxford? And a mysterious city, capital of England’s greatest county, Zork? (Twice that one appears!). As for the Latin quotations – don’t get me started.