Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/629

Rh ALMANAC 591 The other characters on the upper side are for saints days and festivals. Thus Epiphany (Jan. 6) is indicated by a star, St Hilary (Jan. 13) by a bishop s double cross, the con version of St Paul (Jan. 25) by an axe, St Valentine (Feb. 14) by a true lover s knot, St Matthias (Feb. 24) by a battle-axe, &c. All the feasts of the Virgin, as the Puri fication (Feb. 2) and the Annunciation (March 25), are denoted by a heart Dr Plot was greatly puzzled to know why. St Blaise (Feb. 3), St Agatha (Feb. 5), and others were indicated by their initials; and opposite the day (March 1) consecrated to David, the patron saint of Wales, is a symbol which some consider a harp and others a leek. The earliest almanac regarding which Lalande (whose Bibliographic Astronomique, Paris, 1803, is the best autho rity on publications of this kind) could obtain any definite information belongs to the 12th century. Manuscript almanacs of considerable antiquity are preserved in the British Museum and in the libraries of Oxford and Cam bridge. Of these the most remarkable are a calendar ascribed to Roger Bacon (1292), and those of Peter de Dacia (about 1X00), Walter de Elvendene (1327), John Somers (1380), &c. It is to be remembered that early calendars (such as the Kalendarium Lincolniense of Bishop Robert Grosseteste) frequently bear the names, not of their compilers, but of the writers of the treatises on ecclesiastical computation on which the calendars are based. In 1812 there was printed at Hackney what pur ported to be a transcription of the greater part of an almanac for 1386. This, if it exists, must be one of the earliest, perhaps the earliest, in the English language that has been preserved. The earliest English calendar in the British Museum is one for the year 1431. The first printed almanac known is one for the year 1457; the first of importance is that of Joannes de Monte-Regio, better known as Regiomontanus, which appears to have been printed at Nuremberg in 1472. In this work the almanacs for the different months embrace three Metonic cycles, or the 57 years from 1475 to 1531 inclusive. The Ephemerides of Regiomontanus, which are to be distin guished from his almanac, were sold, it is said, for ten crowns of gold, considerably more than their own weight. The earliest almanac printed in England was The Kalendar of Shepardes, a translation from the French, printed by Richard Pynson about 1497. The exclusive right to sell &quot; almanacs and prognostica tions,&quot; enjoyed in the time of Elizabeth by two members of the Company of Stationers, was extended by James I. to the two universities and the Stationers Company jointly; but the universities commuted their privilege for an annuity from the company. About a century ago one Thomas Carnan, a bookseller, conceiving that the company had no just title to its monopoly, published an almanac for three successive years, and was thrice imprisoned on that account by the company. In 1775 the case came before the Court of Common Pleas, and was decided in Carnan s favour. The question argued was, &quot; Whether almanacs were such public ordinances, such matters of state, as belonged to the king by his prerogative, so as to enable him to communi cate an exclusive right of printing them to a grantee of the crown V and the judges were unanimously of the opinion that the crown had no such right. The minister, Lord North, made an attempt in 1779 to put the company in possession, by a parliamentary enactment, of what the judges had denied it; but the proposed monopoly was denounced by Erskine and others with such ability and severity that the bill was thrown out by a majority of forty-five. In consequence of this loss to the company of its exclusive right to issue almanacs, the universities lost their title to their annuity, and in lieu of it they received a parliamentary grant. The company continued, however, virtually to retain its monopoly by buying up as much as possible all the almanacs issued by other publishers, and by means of the great influence it possessed over the book trade. In more recent times the power to control the sale of this class of publications has altogether ceased, but a considerable proportion of the almanacs published in this country still issue from the hall of the Stationers Company. A lively description of &quot; Almanac Day &quot; at Stationers Hall will be found in Knight s Cyclopaedia, of London (1851), p. 588. The influence of the heavenly bodies on the conditions and affairs of men has been believed in, and a superstitious importance has been attached to particular times and seasons by the credulous from the remotest times. As might be imagined, therefore, since the bases on which the whole system of judicial astrology rested all fall within the field of the almanac-makers labours, great prominence was given to omens and predictions in many of these publications. The early almanacs had commonly the name of &quot; prognostications &quot; in addition, and what they pro fessed to show may be gathered from titles like the fol lowing, which is quoted by Mr Halliwell : &quot; Pronosty- cacyon of Mayster John Thybault, medycyner and astro nomer of the Emperyall Majestic, of the year of our Lorde God MCCCCCXXXIIJ., comprehending the iiij. partes of this yere, and of the influence of the mone, of peas and warre, and of the sykenesses of this yere, with the constellacions of them that be under the vij. pianettes, and the revolu- cions of kynges and princes, and of the eclipses and comets.&quot; In 1579 Henry III. of France deemed it neces sary to prohibit all almanac-makers from indulging in predictions. No such restriction, however, existed in this country; and it was to their prophesyings that the almanacs of the Stationers Company were long indebted for much of their popularity. Among almanacs of this class pub lished in England, and principally by the Stationers Com pany, are Leonard Digges s Prognostication Everlasting of Right Good Effect, for 1553, 1555, &c.; William Lilly s Merlimis Anglicus Junior, for 1644, &c., and other al manacs and &quot;prognostications;&quot; Booker s Bloody Almanac and Bloody Irish Almanac, for 1643, 1647, &amp;lt;fcc. the last attributed erroneously to Napier ; Partridge s Mercurials Coelestis, for 1681, Merlinus Rediviviis, &c. The name of Partridge has been immortalised in Pope s Rape of the Lock; and his almanacs were very cleverly burlesqued by Swift, who predicted Partridge s own death, with all details of time and circumstance, in genuine prognosticator s style. The most famous of all the Stationers Company s predict ing almanacs was the Vox Stellarum of Francis Moore, dating from about 1680. Of a different but not a better sort was Poor Robin, dating from 1663, and published by the company down to 1828, which abounded in coarse, sometimes extremely coarse, humour. On the 1st of January 1828 the Society for the Diffu sion of Useful Knowledge issued the British Almanac for that year a publication greatly superior in every way to the almanacs of the time. To quote the society s Almanac for 1829 &quot;This was almost the first attempt in this country to produce an almanac that should not only be useful to all classes, and of which the information should be wholly of a popular character, but which should be purified from the superstitions, prejudices, and indecencies which have characterised some of the almanacs of which the circula tion has been the most extensive. By a parliamentary return of the year 1828 we find that the stamp duty paid upon the almanacs of England exhibits a circulation of 451,593 annually. It may be safely asserted that two-thirds of these publications contain some large portion of the matter just described ; and they thus keep alive a spirit of ignorance utterly opposed to the desire for sound and practical information which distinguishes our own times.&quot; The success of the British Almanac, with its valuable