In the UK, the financial year ends on 5 April. This is Lady Day (25 March) plus the 11 days lost in the transition from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar in 1752.
I believe IBM pay its UK workers on the 6th because at one point they wanted to move pay day to as early as possible without paying more than 12 times in a tax year. This means that the day lots of people get paid in 2025 has been set by a deliberate simplification Julius Ceasar made in 46BC. That's technical debt that lasted a long time.
Looking at the names of the months, September is the 9th month and October is the 10th? December is the 12th? Those names changed to those numberings roughly about the same time,
and is also tech debt.
US tax return forms/documentation is due April 15, but the taxes needed to be paid by the previous Jan 15 (minus a several month reprieve for taxes on income that exceeds your previous year's income)
on April 15 the taxes on your first quarter of the current year are also due.
A decent case can be made for March 1 as the start of the year. With March 1 as the start of the year the extra day in leap years then comes on the last day of the year. This makes dealing with leap years when calculating the day of the week from a date simpler.
It also makes the names of September, October, November, and December make sense. Those names come from the Roman words for 7, 8, 9, and 10, which were the numbers of those months in the old Roman calendar which did start the year on March 1. The Romans switch the start to January sometime around 700 BCE giving us the current ridiculous situation where those months are two months later in the year than their names suggest.
The change was made by Caesar's reform of calendar in 46BC. January first was the date of consular elections, and Romans didn't used year number ab urbe condita ("since the foundation of Rome") regularly in daily life, instead they called the years by the running consuls' names. Therefore it made more sense for Romans to start the year at January first.
Starting from March also sets up a neat pattern that can be used to generate accurate month/day values from day-of-year numbers, IF you number them from zero. You can also go back the other way.
March through July follow a simple two-month cycle of 31 days, followed by 30, repeating at May and July. August breaks the cycle with 31 days, but it essentially restarts, and runs a second five months before it breaks again, at January (the 11th month, since we started from March). The third run obviously runs out after February, ending prematurely, but this doesn't really break the cycle, either. You just restart again with March!
This allows you to write some (relatively) simple conversions using just a few divisors, along with some conversions from 1-based to 0-based numbering, and back. 153 days every five months, 61 every two, and of course 31 for a single month. Divide the remainder from each prior division by the next divisor, and the final remainder is your (0-based) day of the month. The month itself (taking 0 = March) is then the sum of each quotient multiplied by the associated count of months.
Well, that’s what the internet told me. But checking again it is also telling me 45 BC and 153 BC.
The site that gave me the 700 BC date said it was done by king Numa Pompilius. Wikipedia’s article on him says that Plutarch is the source for the claim Numa moved the new year to January.
But Plutarch was writing around the 2nd century and Wikipedia says his writings about Numa give unique information on the Roman calendar which suggests that there aren’t other sources. Probably not worth trusting a single source that old writing about something 900 years older.
Tolkien also timed the end of the War of the Ring, and the start of the Fourth Age the following year, to March 25th. It’s a deliberate echo of the Annunciation — or in-universe context, a foreshadowing.
In Exodus 12:1-2, at the beginning of the section that decrees Passover, God also tells Moses and Aaron that the month of Passover is the first month of the year:
The Lord said to Moses and Aaron in Egypt, "This month is
to be for you the first month, the first month of your
year. ..."
There's a weird parallel between the Hebrew and Gregorian calendars. In both cases, the historic "new year" is in spring (Hebrew Nisan, Gregorian March), perhaps to coincide with planting? And in both cases intercalation happens right before that, at the end of the year - the Hebrew calendar duplicates Adar, the month before Nisan, and the Gregorian has an extra day of February. (Historically this was February 24 happening twice, not an additional day numbered 29, which is a whole other story.) But in both cases the year number increments at a different time - Hebrew Tishri in the fall, Gregorian January in the winter - so the intercalation appears to happen at some "random" moment within the year.
The year begins on January 1st per Julius Caesar's calendar reform of 46BC, because in Rome the year was called by the name of the elected consuls, and consuls were elected on January first. So basically, up until this change it was confusing for the Romans to call the year by the current consuls' names, though actually the current year ran from March to March (starting at the equinox).
The article mentions parliament may rival doctor Who. However, the Eleven-day Empire appears in Doctor Who. That organisation has set up their base in a time loop consisting of those days that this law excluded from the official calendar. Thus, Dr Who very explicitly has matched this parlimentary act, I suppose.
Engaging with TFA's thesis: occasionally, it's correct for institutions to insist on law over lore. For one, that lore might be just as artificial or short-lived or "mistaken" (as much as these things can be) as anything seeking to replace it - as some comments have mentioned, the "customary" start of the year was itself imposed by Caesar amid a history of a March start. It might also be in society's best interests that cooler heads determine a particular course. The "lore" of the demihumanity of certain populations takes hold popularly, from time to time, for example. The law prevents, in the worst cases, slaughter (or builds parameters for punishment and future deterrence after the fact).
Readit News
on April 15 the taxes on your first quarter of the current year are also due.
It also makes the names of September, October, November, and December make sense. Those names come from the Roman words for 7, 8, 9, and 10, which were the numbers of those months in the old Roman calendar which did start the year on March 1. The Romans switch the start to January sometime around 700 BCE giving us the current ridiculous situation where those months are two months later in the year than their names suggest.
March through July follow a simple two-month cycle of 31 days, followed by 30, repeating at May and July. August breaks the cycle with 31 days, but it essentially restarts, and runs a second five months before it breaks again, at January (the 11th month, since we started from March). The third run obviously runs out after February, ending prematurely, but this doesn't really break the cycle, either. You just restart again with March!
This allows you to write some (relatively) simple conversions using just a few divisors, along with some conversions from 1-based to 0-based numbering, and back. 153 days every five months, 61 every two, and of course 31 for a single month. Divide the remainder from each prior division by the next divisor, and the final remainder is your (0-based) day of the month. The month itself (taking 0 = March) is then the sum of each quotient multiplied by the associated count of months.
Reversing the process, I'll leave to the reader.
That doesn’t look right.
The site that gave me the 700 BC date said it was done by king Numa Pompilius. Wikipedia’s article on him says that Plutarch is the source for the claim Numa moved the new year to January.
But Plutarch was writing around the 2nd century and Wikipedia says his writings about Numa give unique information on the Roman calendar which suggests that there aren’t other sources. Probably not worth trusting a single source that old writing about something 900 years older.
https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/25_March
https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/2164005/jewis...
It was also the first month of the Roman calendar until January and February were added.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martius_(month)
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