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Double Dating
The Julian and Gregorian Calendars
Many parts of the world from around 45 BC used the Julian Calendar which used March 25 as the first day of the year. Pope Gregory XIII worked out that the Roman Emperor had miscalculated the length of the solar year by 11 minutes which meant that over time the calendar had lost ten days.
So in 1582 Pope Gregory XIII decided to solve and correct the problem by taking away ten days and making 1st January the first day of the year.
England and Scotland, as Protestant countries, didn’t officially accept this new calendar until 1752 by which time the two countries had joined. Up until then the government still observed March 25th as the first of the year, whereas most of the rest of the population observed the first of the year as January 1st. For this reason, many people wrote dates falling between January 1 and March 25 with both years e.g. January 3 1700/01 or March 1718/9.
Then in 1752 an Act of Parliament was passed and the Gregorian Calendar became the official calendar for the whole of Great Britain. This meant that, by this time, the new calendar needed to lose 11 days to bring it in line with the solar year. So overnight on September 2nd the calendar advanced to September 14th.