Page:American Historical Review vol. 6.djvu/447

 TJic Year looo 437 Europe till after the }'car 1000" — wherefore the name of iiiillcsime, by which the I'Vench still call a Christian date. In Spain, indeed, it was not used until the fourteenth century; and by Greek Chris- tians not until the fifteenth. Even when it had come in, it was reinforced in all formal papers by other datings — by the regnal years of pope or emperor or king, by the year of the indiction, perhaps by others. Nor was it yet or for long agreed just how to reckon by the Christian calendar. Some preferred to count their years from the Lord's Passion, in- stead of his Incarnation. And if from the Incarnation, should that be dated from the Nativity, at December 25, or from the Concep- tion, three-quarters of a year earlier? Dionysius himself would seem to have preferred the latter ; and even to this day we cannot be sure whether he meant to place the birth of Christ at the begin- ning or at the end of the first year of our Christian calendar — in the year 753 or the year 754 of the Roman city. Throughout the Middle Ages there prevailed the widest variance as to when the New Year should set in — here it was begun at Christmas, there at Annunciation, yonder at Easter, in Venice on the first of March, in Russia at the vernal equinox, in the Greek Empire on the first of September, in Spain on the first of January. Florence and Pisa, agreeing in the use of that Marj'-year which was still in vogue among our great-grandfathers in England and America as late as 1752, could yet not agree ivhich twenty -fifth of March one ought to count from ; and, neighbor-towns though they were, Pisa began her year just twelve months ahead of Florence. What havoc must this work with the punctuality of the end of the world I And if through such confusion men's sense of date grew blunt, how much more through the needlessness to most people of dates at all — that is, of Christian-era dates. To us who at every turn are stared at by calendars and date-lines, who must every day of our lives again and again write day and month and year, it is not easy to realize a world wherein all this is the affair of priests and no- taries. The ordinary man, gentle and simple, of the year loOO, could not have read a date if he had seen it. And, just as the hours of the day were to him not figures on a dial but those re- minders which at prime and terce and sext and none and evensong called to him through the sweet bells of parish-church or minster, so his landmarks of the year were the great days of the Church, her feasts, her vigils, and her fasts — Easter and Ascension and Whitsunday, Michaelmas and Christmas and Ash-Wednesday — underscored and red-lettered for him by the solemn pageantry of worship. If Annunciation and Good Friday fell together, that was startling ; but what recked he of years of the Incarnation ?