Usually we say Happy New Year with an exclamation point, but this episode I've put a question mark,

because the new year is a little elusive as you study over history.

First, we've got to go back to the time of the Romans and back to the institution of the Julian calendar.

Of course, this is Julius Caesar, and he instituted January 1 as the beginning of the new year and as the beginning of his new calendar.

That was 45 BC.

But over the centuries, especially as Rome became more and more Christianized,

and we have the Holy Roman Empire and we have Christendom, Christians weren't too wild about

starting the year on January the 1st because there was no significant religious holiday

associated with it. And also, the Julian calendar was slightly off. It had miscalculated the length of a year.

And so Pope Gregory the 13th made an adjustment to the Julian calendar.

And this had to do not only with the Julian calendar being off,

but also with the shifting dates of Easter.

He did this in 1582. And yes, if you're paying attention, this is the 16th century.

And so you'd think the popes might be paying more attention to the Reformation than the calendar,

but nevertheless, that's what Gregory was doing.

In fact, discussions of adjusting the calendar actually began, at all places, the Council of Trent and the 1560s,

which was convened, of course, to respond to Luther and the other reformers and the Protestant Reformation,

but they needed to make adjustments to the calendars.

Well, as you can imagine, Protestants were suspicious about this Gregorian calendar and this new calendar,

and some of them just opted out of it. In fact, England sort

of was doing its own thing for quite a while back in 1155. And so from 1155 all the way until

1752, for England, March 25 was actually the start of the legal year. The new year was March 25. It was called

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