Lady Day: March 25 was the start of the year in England and Wales until 1752

Conversation
The Annunciation. Painted by Leonardo da Vinci

We associate New Year with deep mid-winter and the tidy date of January 1, but for 600 years between 1155 until 1752 in England and Wales the new year began on 25 March. This day was one of the quarter days that divided the year historically and on which rents and debts were settled. March 25 became the quarter day where annual accounts were finalised. So, around about now, we’d have been preparing to welcome in a new year alongside the warmer weather and spring blooms.

Celebrations were double as the legal and ecclesiastical calendar worked in harmony as March 25 is also Lady Day or the Feast of the Annunciation. Falling exactly nine months before Christmas Day, for Christians it marks when the archangel Gabriel informed Mary that she was shortly to bear a son.

Feast days are normally days of indulgence and merrymaking, but Lady Day normally falls in Lent, a time of abstinence. This meant, for some, Lady Day was a temporary lightening of Lenten restrictions.

Also known as Annunciation Day, Lady Day has sometimes fallen on Good Friday, as it did in 1608. This day is the opposite of a feast day, marking the crucifixion and death of Christ, which is observed through fasting and abstinence. The poet John Donne reflected on this crossover in 1608 in Upon the Annunciation where he saw it as an opportunity to be extra pious:

“Tamely, frail body, abstain today;
today My soul eats twice,
Christ hither and away”

So for Donne, this was a day of fasting and reflection to commemorate both the coming of Christ and his death.

Superstitions

Lady Day has many associated superstitions. An anonymous pamphlet printed in 1721 called When my Lord Falls in my Lady’s Lap, England Beware of a Great Mishap takes its title from an old saying that means that it is unlucky when Lady Day falls on or near Easter Sunday. The author proceeds to run through the many calamities that have happened on such inauspicious occasions.

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