ABSTRACT
The calendar was more widely contested in England in the seventeenth century than before or since. The millenarian obsession with sacred and secular chronology produced new thinking about the correct basis for the calendar. The first half of the seventeenth century saw, in Ronald Hutton’s phrase, “the battle for merry England”, as puritans and ritualists battled over the ritual calendar for the soul of the Church of England. The civil war years saw both royalist and puritan moves to reform the calendar, none of them very serious but interesting nonetheless. Under the commonwealth, anglicanism suffered a kind of internal exile until 1660, when Charles II, “the merry monarch”, was welcomed back with maypoles and morris dancing. At the same time, the Royal Society was founded, so that the long Indian summer of the anglican festive calendar coincided with what used to be called “the rise of modern science”. At the end of the century England had to decide again whether to reform the calendar, this time with the model of an explicitly protestant version of calendar reform from the Empire before it. The episode of 1699-1700 is dealt with in Chapter 7; the present chapter prepares the ground by looking at seventeenth-century conflicts over the calendar, in the period between the two failed calendar reforms of 1583 and 1699. Three broad approaches to the issue of the calendar will be considered: puritan, anglican, and scientific.1
