Lady Day is the Feast of the Annunciation in the Christian calendar. It falls on the 25th of March and today is often referred to as “Lady’s Day”.
The Christian day should be important to genealogists as it is one of the four traditional Irish and English quarter days. Even more important, in England, Lady Day was New Year’s Day on the Julian Calendar. The logic of using Lady Day as the beginning day of the year is that it counts the years A.D. from the moment of the conception of Jesus, the Incarnation, rather than from His birth. Incarnation was reckoned to have occurred on 25 March 0 B.C..
Beginning in 1752, England moved to the Gregorian Calendar, making 1 January the first day of the new year. And, as they say, “the rest is history”; a confused history of dates in genealogical records for the mid 1700s.
Save This Page
Edna -
In England the Quarter Days were traditionally days when debts were settled and when magistrates would visit outlying districts to administer their justice.
There is a strong principle of English justice tied up in this - “debts and unresolved conflicts must not be allowed to linger on” past the quarter sessions.
It was deemed that “However complex the case, however difficult to settle the debt, a reckoning has to be made and publicly recorded; for it is one of the oldest legal principles of this country that justice delayed is injustice”. On the Way to the Postmodern - see below.
When the Barons had the unjust King John sign the Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215 one of the main principles embodied into it was the promise: “To none will we sell, or deny, or delay right or justice”.
Comment by grityourteeth — April 21, 2007 @ 10:24 am