7 minute read
History
Happy Holidays
WE ALL VALUE OUR HOLIDAYS, BUT WHEN DID THEY START? WHO WAS RESPONSIBLE? WHAT DETERMINES THE DATE?
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By Mike George
Mike George is our regular contributor on wildlife and the countryside in France. He is a geologist and naturalist, living in the Jurassic area of the Charente
My guess is that it all started with the Winter Solstice. You, as an exhunter-gatherer, have recently discovered agriculture, and have noticed that this relies on the sun. You have also noticed that the sun has a peculiar habit of descending towards the horizon as the days go by, and then going back up again, thereby having a serious effect upon the climate, the length of the day and your ability to feed yourself and your family. You have this lurking fear that the sun may forget to go back up again. A festival to remind him to do so is a good plan. Now you have the Winter Solstice festival. It happens when the weather is not suitable for planting and growing and harvesting, so there is nothing much for you to do except party. Of course, this wasn’t a holiday (you can bet there wasn’t much holy about it!) but it was a break from normal life and a chance to let your hair down. As the centuries passed, things got a bit more organised. The life of man was one of toil and hardship, and the more times this could be relieved, the better. The Sabbath, the one day in seven when man could rest, was soon established. Attempts to change that have always resulted in disaster. It seems to fit with Man’s circadian rhythms. From it springs the seven-day week.
The Church gets involved
The Church, when it finally gained a foothold in Society, brought wonderful new opportunities for rest. Christmas replaced the Winter Solstice Festival, Easter came along in spring to swallow up any unseemly welcoming of the season of fertility, and Saints’ Days gave numerous excuses for a day of contemplation instead of toil. We also got the word “holiday”, of course! Of all the bank holidays in England only Good Friday and Christmas Day are enshrined in Common Law, having been celebrated since “Time Immemorial" (for reference, that in law means, "since before Richard 1st came to the throne in 1189”). All other holidays are either announced by Royal Decree annually, or fixed by statute. Thus, two festivals were set – or were they? Christmas happened on 25th December (or was it 12 January? That gave rise to some fierce arguments in the 17th century.) and Easter happened on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. This itself sounds fairly complicated and is the result of the only certain thing we know about the timing of the crucifixion of Jesus, namely that it all happened around the Feast of Passover, which, since the Jews used a lunar calendar, was fixed by lunar calculation. Indeed, there were problems even with that. You may have noticed that this year, the Jewish Passover happened a week before Easter. That was because the full moon actually fell on the Sunday which coincided with the equinox, and the two religions had slightly different criteria for fixing the day of the festival. This moveability of Easter has always been a problem, in that Easter could happen any time within a five-week period, which made it difficult to decide when the holiday industry should kick into action. Also, different Christian sects were prone to using slightly different criteria, and again Easter could be celebrated on two dates in the same year, even by Christians. This is what the Synod of Whitby in 664 was largely about. It is a little-known fact that the UK Parliament passed an act, the Easter Act 1928, which would allow the date of Easter Day to be set as the second (or possible third) Sunday in April, but it was left to the church to make the final arrangements, and nothing happened. The Act is still on the statute books, and I understand that there are moves afoot in the major Churches to resurrect the idea (no pun intended). As far as the other potential holidays went, to a great extent you could decide for yourself when to have a festival. Choose a saint to venerate, or to be the patron of your Church, and there you were.
The Needs of Industry
This didn’t much matter when everything was decentralised and holidays were not so disruptive of the workforce. However, when the Industrial Revolution came along, and the various sections of industry became interdependent, trouble loomed. At the beginning of the 19th century, the Bank of England (since we are talking about bank holidays) recognised about 40 saints’ days as holidays during the year. Again, these may for the most part have been celebrated locally, not nationally. In 1834 this was slashed to 4, namely May Day, All Saints’ Day, Good Friday and Christmas Day. This didn’t last long. Although it is difficult to determine how widespread such a curtailment must have been, the Bank of England was back up to between 6 and 18 holidays by 1845. But the general populace was getting a raw deal. Some factories, where annual maintenance had to be done, would declare a “Wakes Week" when the factory would be shut down, the maintenance men would go in and the workers could join an excursion or make their own arrangements. No picking the date for your holiday!
Mind you, there weren’t the facilities of organisation for extended holidays. Seaside holidays were mainly for the rich, and travel abroad was for the very rich. No aeroplanes, no organised cruises (except to Australia if you were convicted).
Where do the banks come in all this?
Mind you, at this time banks did have a bit of a problem. When a delayed bill became due for payment, the date of payment was stated, and if the bank happened to be closed for holidays on that day, the bank could be sued for not discharging its duty. They needed statutory protection. In 1871, Sir John Lubbock, a Liberal politician, introduced the Bank Holidays Act to Parliament, and it was passed. This created the bank holiday as we know it, when a worker could not be compelled to work on certain days (except by agreement or extra pay). This bill also stated that, if a bill fell due on a bank holiday, payment could be made on the next trading day without the banks incurring a penalty, which solved that little problem. In England, Wales and Ireland the new holidays were Easter Monday, Whit Monday, the first Monday in August and Boxing Day (remember Good Friday and Christmas Day were a legal right). Scotland also got New Year’s Day, the first Monday in May, and Good Friday and Christmas Day were specified, as Scotland didn’t have Common Law! Over the years, other days have been added. England got New Year’s Day in about 1970 and May 1st in 1978. The dates of Whit Monday and August Bank Holiday were changed in the mid-20th century in an attempt to avoid overloading the holiday destinations (those of us old enough to remember the Mods and Rockers at Brighton in the 1960s will know why). As usual, the change to August Bank Holiday (under Edward Heath in 1965) was at first done tentatively, “to see if it works”, and as a result the actual dates tended to be announced so late that calendarmakers could not incorporate them, and the holiday sometimes ended up in September. It was finally settled by the 1971 Holidays Act. In addition, Ireland was given St Patrick’s Day and Battle of the Boyne Day. Scotland was given St Andrew’s Day. Whatever happened to St George’s Day? Or St David’s Day?
What happens elsewhere?
Europe, of course, has made its own arrangements for holidays. A lot of them (despite the avowed secularisation of most of the republican rhetoric) are religious holidays, but of course VE Day and 11th November are important (perhaps less so in some countries), as are national events such as the various Republic Days. Of all the European Union countries, Austria seems at first sight to have the most declared holidays, but a careful inspection reveals that many of these are named Sundays. In many European countries, if the holiday falls on Sunday, tough, you don’t get an alternative. Britain has always tried to find an alternative, though, and this is often written into the Statute. The United States has a plethora of statutory holidays. Most of them commemorate great events or great men, some of whom are now forgotten. These have a tendency to move about the calendar, too, which adds to the confusion. In Latin American countries, religious holidays tend to dominate. The dates of national holidays tend to vary as El Presidente changes. African countries are a study on their own. In the Far East, an entirely new calendar comes into play, and totally different rules apply. Try living through Chinese New Year and trying to understand what’s going on. I wish you all a very happy Maytime of assorted holidays.
