ELIZABETHAN YEAR The number of the year did not change on New Years Day. The English calendar had come down from the Romans, for whom January 1 was the first day of the year. Accordingly this was called New Year�s Day and was observed as an official holiday as the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ. However, the number of the year did not actually change until March 25, the Feast of the Annunciation. England differed from the Continent in this respect. The day that a sixteenth-century Frenchman (and a modern person) would consider January 1, 1589 would be called January 1, 1588 in sixteenth-century England. Educated Englishmen sometimes dealt with this problem by writing the date as 1Jan1588/9. On March 25 the year would be written as 1589, and England would be in line with the rest of Europe until January 1 came around again. England was using a slightly different calendar from most of Western Europe (the exceptions being the other Protestant countries and certain Italian city-states). This was the Julian Calendar, so names by Julius Caesar. This calendar had leap-years, which actually made the Julian year slightly longer than the actual solar year. In 1582 Pope Gregory XIII established the Gregorian Calendar, which we still use today, by which three out of four years ending in �00 (e.g. 1900, are not leap-years). This calendar was much more accurate, but England was so fiercely anti-Catholic that it did not follow the Pope�s lead until 1752. Sandee