The Calendar

by David Ewing Duncan

  *Bede cites about 175 sources in his writings.

  Likewise, Bede and his countrymen were only vaguely aware of events beyond the frigid, turbulent waters of the Mare Germanicum, now known as the North Sea. It probably took several years, for instance, for Northumbrians to find out that the mother church in Rome had finally broken off its titular allegiance to Constantinople, which had claimed authority over the former imperial provinces of the West as the inheritor to Rome--a claim that had become increasingly unrealistic after the failed attempt of Justinian to reconquer the West. In part this break came about because of another seismic event happening far from the British Isles--the sudden appearance of Islam in the mid-seventh century, which eventually forced the Byzantines to recall their legions from central Italy. Following Mohammed’s teaching and his founding of the first mosque at Medina in 622--year 1 in the Moslem calendar--the armies of Islam had swept like a firestorm to seize Arabia, Mesopotamia, Persia and Egypt by 651; North Africa by 702; and Spain and parts of Asia Minor by 711, when Bede was about 38 years old. By then the stunned Byzantines had lost nearly their entire empire, and were fortunate to have held on to their heartland in western Asia Minor, coastal Greece and Sicily.

  Meanwhile the politics in the West remained confused, with shifting tribes battling, conquering and being conquered. Lombards reigned for the moment in northern Italy. East of the Danube lived pagan Slavs, who had gradually enveloped much of the former provinces of Rome in northern Greece and in the Balkans. Closer to Britain, the Franks had dominated what is now France and Germany for over a century; in 732, a year after Bede published his History, the Merovingian kings of France decisively beat back the Moslem invaders of Spain as they attempted to roll into southern France.

  In faraway Britain this was at best a distant rumble, though it’s likely that Bede himself felt far more isolated intellectually than geographically. Indeed, he lived in a time when even monks in monasteries were turning away from all but a crude understanding of basic scholarship, either because they lacked manuscripts and teachers or because they had no use for knowledge they considered ungodly and profane. Most aspired to follow Cassiodorus’s admonition to learn, though few succeeded beyond a clumsy understanding of basic concepts. In France one senior cleric complained that many monks and churchmen were completely illiterate. At Jarrow Bede himself had to translate the Lord’s Prayer from Latin to the local vernacular so that his brothers could understand the Latin words they spoke when they prayed.

  Scholarship in many places was reduced to learning a few key subjects by rote and devoting one’s life to copying ancient manuscripts, which most monks held in awe as artefacts of a glorious past, but few understood. A number of monks lost their eyesight scratching out copies in the semi-darkness of their stone cells, since candles were not allowed for fear fire would consume the ancient parchments. ‘He who does not turn up the earth with the plough,’ a sixth-century monk admonished his brothers, ‘ought to write parchments with his fingers.’ Many monks did not stop with mere writing, but also adorned their manuscripts with stunningly beautiful ornaments, calligraphy and illustrations: glittering gold-leafed letters and painted flowers and vines; masterly images of winged angels, fiery demons, tortured saints and Christ enthroned in heaven. Some of the most dazzling illuminations appear on medieval calendars, which typically list month-by-month dates and saints’ days, and are lavishly illustrated with scenes of peasants gathering hay in June, nobles hunting and drinking wine in August and peasants huddling beside hearth fires as snow blankets the out-of-doors in February.

  If few of these monks thought deeply about the knowledge in these lovely books, fewer still came up with their own interpretations about time reckoning or anything else in the scientific realm. This makes a genuine scholar such as Bede all the rarer. In fact, the only other truly notable time reckoner in these dark days of the early Middle Ages was Isidore of Seville (560-636), a Roman ecclesiastic and scholar living in another distant outpost of the former empire: Visigoth Spain. The Archbishop of Seville, Isidore is known for eradicating Arianism among the Visigoths and stifling other so-called heresies in Spain--and for compiling a great encyclopaedia along the lines of Cassiodorus’s, a summa of universal knowledge as it existed in this sunny, hot corner of Europe. Preserving numerous fragments of classical works that otherwise would have been lost, he described the fundamentals of general astronomy and mathematics, including a section on time reckoning and the Easter cycle that would be used by Bede and other time reckoners over the next few centuries.

  Yet even Isidore’s work follows the tendency of this era to substitute copying and the reiteration of past thinking for true scholarship. Little in his encyclopaedia is original, and some of it is poorly written. Isidore even apes Cassiodorus’s admonition to learn and understand astronomy and mathematics, offering little analysis or insight of his own. ‘Remove computus from the world,’ Isidore wrote, essentially plagiarizing an almost identical statement made by Cassiodorus, ‘and everything is given over to blind ignorance ... If you remove the number from objects, then everything collapses.’

  This encouraged many a medieval monk to embrace the science of computus, though at the same time Isidore, like Cassiodorus, instructed his brothers to think of timekeeping devices as mere tools, like a key or a chain--an admonition that reinforced the medieval tendency to rely on already established equations and rules that required little imagination or creativity, a process that perpetuated the prevailing simplification of Augustine of Hippo’s view that understanding time beyond a simple calendar and dating Easter was better left to God.

  During this period most of Europe still followed Julius Caesar’s basic calendar, though pagans beyond the Christian realms continued to use their own ancient calendars. To the north the Saxons (those who had not emigrated to Britain) and other old German tribes used a combination lunar-solar calendar that started with the twelve lunar months and then added a month every so often to match it up with the solar year. This calendar began on 25 December, shortly after the winter solstice. Month names included the third month, Solmonath, the month of offering cakes; Blodmonath, the month of sacrifice; and Eosturmonath, named after the goddess of spring and twilight, Eostre. Another modern word derived from the Saxon calendar comes from Guili, the name of the Saxons’ first and last months of the year. The Old English for Guili is geol; in modern English it is yule. Guili occurred during winter, hence ‘yule log’ and ‘yule season’. The Slavs who dominated eastern Europe during Bede’s day apparently used a purely lunar calendar. Islam, symbolized by the crescent moon, also ignored the sun and still does in its religious calendar, which drifts across the solar year at a pace of eleven days a year. Further east, the Chinese under the T’angs--one of the richest and most stable dynasties in Chinese history, then at the height of its power and influence--continued to use a calendar similar to those developed in ancient Babylon and Greece a thousand years earlier. Based on a lunar year, this calendar added extra months seven times during a 19-year cycle. They assigned numbers to identify each month, but used their zodiac symbols to name years in a 12-year cycle of animals: the rat, ox, tiger, hare, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, rooster, dog and pig. The Gregorian year 2000, for instance, is the year of the dragon. The year of Bede’s death in 735 was the year of the pig.

  From the perspective of a T’ang astronomer in 735 it would have been laughable to imagine that Bede’s calendar would one day become the world’s. Still, even as invaders on all sides conquered territories once Christian, the seeds were being sown to expand the hold of Christianity--and by default the Julian calendar. Christianity had always been a proselytizing religion, taking literally the words of Christ when he said, ‘Follow me.’ Like Islam, it offered a potent and coherent set of religious ideals and duties that proved highly attractive to religiously minded people. Also like Islam, it had fused its doctrines and faith with the apparatus of political power--first under the aegis of Rome and more recently under the s
ponsorship of barbarian kings converted to Christianity. This made the spread of Christianity less an individual decision than a strategic ideology of kings, nobles and through them entire peoples.

  By the time Bede was a young man, the Church’s conversion of barbari and the conquests of Islam had precipitated a titanic shift in Christianity’s geography, transforming it from a religion primarily of the Mediterranean and Near East to a European religion. The most critical moment had come sometime between 496 and 506 when King Clovis of the Franks agreed to be baptized by a Catholic bishop at Reims. A shrewd politician, Clovis embraced Rome to gain the support of Gallo-Roman Catholics in his successful war against the Arian Goths in what is now central and northern France. Clovis’s victories set in motion a kingdom that would eventually split into France and Germany, nations that for centuries remained closely connected with the Church in Rome. The Catholics made further inroads with other Germanic tribes, though Christians in Bede’s day were hardly of one mind. The Goths, Burgundians and Alemanni remained Arian, which was only one of several sects that deviated in ways large and small from official Roman doctrine. Arians, for instance, continued to worship Easter according to their own formulation of dates, as did a remnant of the Celts whose brothers had been massacred by Aethelfrith a century earlier.

  Most of the Christian expansion into Germanic countries remains murky. Details are recorded, if at all, by scattered letters from bishops and popes in Rome and by local chroniclers of Franks and others whose grammar and grasp of literary style was poor and their facts jumbled or suspect. England is an exception because of Bede. But his History is important beyond the stories it tells because Bede chose to use Dionysius Exiguus’s scheme of anni Domini to date the events in his chronology--the first time this was done in such a prominent and widely-read history. He also agreed with Dionysius’s dating of Christ’s birth, affirming the Scythian monk’s designation of the year 1 that we still use today.

  Before Bede, historians had dated events using the reigns of kings and emperors. Or, like the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, they had simply strung together stories roughly in chronological order with no precision in exactly when they took place.

  Bede’s history starts with brief sketches describing the island and original inhabitants of Britain, its conquest, rule and abandonment by Rome, its invasion by Saxons and Angles in their long boats, and the two centuries of chaos that followed as the Germans fought among themselves and against the old Romano-British population. Bede then settles into the meat of his story when Rome in the time of Archbishop Augustine looked once more towards Britain as a country to conquer not militarily but spiritually. Anyway, it seemed to be the next logical step for expanding the Christian reach once Gaul was firmly in the Catholic sphere. Yet Bede insists that the pope who dispatched Augustine to Britain in 596, Pope Gregory I (540-604), was inspired less by strategy than by compassion. Bede tells the story in his History:

  We are told that one day some merchants who had recently arrived in Rome displayed their many wares in the market-place. Among the crowd who thronged to buy was Gregory, who saw among the merchandise some boys exposed for sale. These had fair complexions, fine-cut features and beautiful hair. Looking at them with interest, he inquired from what country and what part of the world they came. ‘They come from the island of Britain,’ he was told, ‘where all the people have this appearance.’ He asked whether they were Christians, or whether they were still ignorant heathens. ‘They are pagans,’ he was informed. ‘Alas!’ said Gregory with a heartfelt sigh: ‘how sad that such bright-faced folk are still in the grasp of the author of darkness.’

  Gregory asked the name of the slave boys’ race and was told they were Angles. ‘That is appropriate,’ he said, ‘for they have angelic faces, and it is right that they should become joint-heirs with the angels in heaven.’*

  *This loses something in translation. In Latin Gregory said: ‘Non Anglii, sed angeli,' literally: ‘Not Angles but angels.’

  Whether moved by the boy slaves or by politics, Pope Gregory in 596 had dispatched Augustine, a Greek monk and Gregory’s former monastic room-mate, from St Peter’s to evangelize the distant Britons. It says a great deal about the state of Europe’s highways--and the immense distance to Britain in the mind-set of these Romans--that when Augustine and an entourage of forty monks ‘progressed a short distance on their journey, they became afraid, and began to consider returning home. For they were appalled at the idea of going to a barbarous, fierce and pagan nation, of whose very language they were ignorant’. The monks became so fearful that they voted to send Augustine back to Rome ‘so that he might humbly request the holy Gregory to recall them from so dangerous, arduous, and uncertain a journey’. Gregory understood their reluctance but ordered them to continue. This reply came in a letter from Gregory that demonstrates the dating system then in use--one that had not yet incorporated Dionysius Exiguus’s new anno Domini concept. After exhorting the monks to continue on to Britain, and asking that ‘God keep you safe, my dearest sons’, Gregory recorded the day he wrote his letter:

  Dated the twenty-third of July, in the fourteenth year of the reign of the most pious Emperor Maurice Tiberius Augustus, and the thirteenth year after his Consulship: the fourteenth indiction.

  The emperor referred to is Maurice of Constantinople, whom the Romans at this time still nominally regarded as the titular ruler of the West; the ‘indiction’ is the year in the fifteen-year cycle that had been used since Diocletian’s time to date Rome’s financial and legal dealings.

  During the days of the empire the journey north from Italy through southern France, and onward to Britain took several days through a settled country over good roads. In 596 the journey took weeks to pass through territories thick with thieves, marauders and stretches of land once peaceful and under till, but now abandoned. Travelling by ship across the channel, Augustine arrived at Ebbsfleet on the island of Thanet, where the Germanic king of Kent, Aethelberht, met him in the open air. Aethelberht was married to a Christian princess from the Frankish royal house but remained a pagan himself. He chose an open field, Bede says, because ‘he held an ancient superstition that, if they were practisers of magical arts, they might have opportunity to deceive and master him’ should he meet them in a more enclosed space. Arriving in full regalia and carrying a cross of silver and a picture of Christ, Augustine and priests made a favourable impression on the king. He even provided them an old basilica in his capital at Canterbury that long ago had been a Christian church under the Romano-Britons--a move that Bede says paved the way for Aethelberht to convert by 601, when Augustine was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury.

  With the conversion of the Saxons came the reintroduction of Caesar’s calendar in Britain, with certain Anglo-Saxon modifications. For instance, the substitution of Germanic planet-gods for those of Rome to designate the days of the week, and the use of the goddess Eostre to name Easter--which then and now is officially called the Feast of the Passion by Catholics. This followed an already long tradition in the Church of absorbing certain pagan customs into local ceremonies and beliefs. This policy was spelled out by Pope Gregory in another letter, where he tells Augustine not to work the Saxons’ pagan temples:

  The idols are to be destroyed, but the temples themselves are to be aspersed with holy water, altars set up in them, and relics deposited there . . . In this way, we hope that the people, seeing that their temples are not destroyed, may abandon their error and, flocking more readily to their accustomed resorts, may come to know and adore the true God. And since they have a custom of sacrificing many oxen to demons, let some other solemnity be substituted in its place, such as a day of Dedication or the Festivals of the holy martyrs whose relics are enshrined there . . . For it is certainly impossible to eradicate all errors from obstinate minds in one stroke.

  Dated the seventeenth of June, in the nineteenth year of the reign of our most pious Lord and Emperor Maurice Tiberius Augustus, and the eighteenth after his C
onsulship: the fourth indiction.

  Gregory does not specifically mention days of the week or the Saxon naming of Easter as part of his campaign. But it is not too much of a stretch to assume that Tiw’s day, Woden’s day, Thor’s day and Freya’s day--and Easter--came to be used in early Christian England as part of an effort to win over the ‘obstinate minds’ of Saxons and Angles.

  When Augustine arrived in Britain in 597 he was, at best, only vaguely aware that Christians already lived on the island--the Celts he would soon meet under the old oak tree. Indeed, these Celts and Romano-Britons may have lost ground against the Germans, but they had been gaining ground for their Celtic church as they proselytized across Ireland, Scotland and northern England, winning souls among the Celtic pagans--who adopted the Celtic system of dating Easter--even as Augustine showed up in the south and began evangelizing for the Roman church.

  Both sects built large monasteries and competed for converts, with Northumbria becoming a major spiritual battleground during the time of King Oswiu (612-670), who embraced the Celtic faith. Then he married the Princess Eanfled of Kent, a Catholic, who brought with her from Canterbury her own bishop and priests. This introduced two dating schemes for Easter to the royal court which in most years did not matter, since the Celtic and Catholic calculations were not far off from each other. But every so often such as in 664--the dates differed. ‘It is said that the confusion in those days,’ writes Bede, ‘was such that Easter was sometimes kept twice in one year, so that when the King had ended Lent and was keeping Easter, the Queen and her attendants were still fasting and keeping Palm Sunday.’ For Christians this was horrific: the royal couple, representing law and truth for their subjects, celebrating the holiest day in the kingdom on separate dates. For people of this period the discrepancy went far beyond a religious squabble. It undermined the order of the state--such as it existed in this still murky time--and of a universe that was supposed to provide absolute answers from an infallible God.