Why Doctor Who Fails at Time Travel in Medieval and Renaissance England

Today, I was doing some research into New Year's during different time periods and checking out some of the awesome calendars people made hundreds of years ago.  Calendars tended to last longer in those days and generally came in book form.  Rather than being the ephemeral items they are today, they were works of art and skill:

 A 1496 copy of the German calendar created by Johannes Von Gmunden (c.1380-1443).  It sold recently for £73,250 ($117,347).  Astrological in nature, but the book also contains a liturgical section.  The moon looks smug though.  It bothers me.

However, I was reminded of something I learned years ago in school -- these medieval and renaissance types used a different calendar back then.  At that point, as I was discussing the nuances of the Julian vs the Gregorian calendars to the other half, he just exclaimed "That's why The Doctor can't ever get anywhere or any-when at the correct time or place!  It's not a big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff -- he's just not taking calendars into account!"

I thought about this a moment and was going to disagree because, well, Time Lord.  But then I remembered that The Doctor couldn't even think to save Rory and Amy from the weeping angels by going to 1935 to pick them up.  So it makes sense to me that he could miss the whole calendars thing, which I should probably now explain, given that I've had caffeine and it's showing.

Or this.  They could have done this.  That would have been fine too.  HOW DID HE NOT SPOT THAT?  Okay, calm.  But it illustrates the point.  No common sense.  Or perhaps New York is just too full of flanginium, that rarest, yet most common of metals.  Incidentally, if you know who the artist for this is, I'd love to give them credit -- this is something that I saw floating around the Internet... :(

See, people have found different ways of measuring time.  The Romans had a few ways, the last of which being the Julian Calendar, brought in by Julius Caesar in 46BC to start in 45BC (by our calendars).  Romans of course measured from the founding of their city, Rome, (Ad Urbis Condita) so this change happened in 708AUC and 709AUC.  For perspective, by their calendar, we're now living in 2676, by the way...

The Julian calendar was all very well and good, except for the fact that it was 11 minutes longer per year than nature allows for.  Doesn't sound much until you realise that over the course of four centuries, it gained around 3 calendar days.  By the time the more accurate Gregorian calendar that we use today was introduced to the Catholic countries of Europe in 1582, the vernal equinox was taking place on the 11th March instead of the church's date of the 21st, meaning that 10 calendar days had been unintentionally inserted over time.  This was unacceptable given that the celebration of Easter was tied to the equinox and the seasons were getting out of sync.

This was further compounded by the fact that yes, under the Julian calendar, the year sensibly started on 1st January.  But of course that didn't take Roman Catholic religious observances -- the liturgical cycle -- which began on 25th March.

A Medieval Calendar:  A page from an English Book of Hours (1401-1414) held at the British Library, helpfully filed as "Royal 2 A XVIII".  This page illustrates 25th March (the Feast of Annunciation), which according to tradition is the day Mary was told "Yo.  You're pregnant."  This was therefore the start of the New Year for countries using the Julian calendar.  

So in practice, there was a secular New Year's Day and a religious one.  The year, however, only went up on the religious New Year's Day, 25th March.  Therefore, if Queen Elizabeth were to write a letter dated on the 1st January, 1567, which is correct from her perspective, we'd view it now as 1st January, 1568, which is correct from ours.  She'd also go to bed on 24th March, 1567 and wake up on 25th March, 1568 and this would be entirely normal.

To make matters even more complicated, note how I mentioned that the Catholic countries adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1582.  So most of Europe (Spain, Portugal, France, Poland, the Netherlands and all their territories) took this on board.  Britain didn't.  It was Protestant and firmly so; this new calendar thing was clearly a Catholic plot by the Pope to bring Britain back into line!  Many Protestant countries felt this way.  However, the new calendar eventually caught on, in time, because it was more accurate.

Britain, her American colony and her territories took on the Gregorian Calendar in 1752.  By this time, the calendar was in something of a bind, so some trickery was used to fudge the dates and bring them into line.  On 24th March, 1751, the next day was 25th March, 1752.  This was actually normal (religious New Year, remember).  But, it was decreed that the year ended on 31st December, 1752, and therefore the year went up, the next day, on 1st January, 1753.  The calendar was also still out by 12 days, however, so 2nd September, 1752 was followed by 14th September, 1752.  1752 was 72 days shorter.  I kid you not.  They just decided to not have those days that year.

A page from William Hunter's Virginia Almanack for September 1752.  Despite 1752 being 72 days shorter than every other year ever, I doubt he gave 20% off his Almanacks (source).

Apparently, this is all even confusing to historians, mostly because half of them update and half of them don't.  Not exactly helpful, but at least they generally state it at the start of their works.  The Gregorian calendar became the worldwide standard over time, though the last country to accept it was Greece in 1923.  The Greek Orthodox churches, however, still use the Julian calendar.

Just as a note:  This will blow my mind at 4am tomorrow night -- when I remember it and I've had a few.  Although no time travelers ever make note of any of these discrepancies, I'm really glad they don't.  It'd just be confusing.  But you'd think The Doctor could at least install some kind of upgrade for it!

America's First Pictures

So two days after Thanksgiving.  I was going to do an article about it, but then steak and beer happened, because what's more American than steak and beer?  Anyhow, it got me to thinking about the first Europeans to settle in America.  No, not the pilgrims and their first Thanksgiving in 1621, but the people who tried to settle at Roanoke, the lost colony.

Detail from Hariot's Briefe and True Account of the New Found Land of Virginia, 1590, showing Roanoke island, the colony and settlement of the local area.

In 1585, a group of 107 men were left on the island to establish a colony at the north end of the island -- probably not far from the one pictured above.  So, having had contact with them in 1586, Sir Walter Raleigh sent out an additional 150 colonists including several women and 9 children to settle on the island.  A friend and colleague of Raleigh's called John White led the mission, taking his daughter and son-in-law with him.  He was an artist and cartographer who'd visited before on the 1585 mission and created maps like this:

 Map of Virginia, from 1985, as printed in Hariot's book.  Roanoke is shown above and to the left of Trinitey Harbor.  Ah, those Elizabethans and their quirky spellings!

White also drew and painted pictures of the flora and fauna of the area, including pictures of the native peoples.  This was actually part of his and Hariot's mission, as people back in England wanted to know what was out there -- after all, resources tend to be good to have.  So they both wrote and drew the first pictures and descriptions of The New World.  The illustrations were mostly done by White and they're incredibly interesting.  For example, there's these two gorgeous pages of nature illustrations:

 Left:  "Meesquouns. Almost as bigg as a Parratt."  A Northern Cardinal.   From the British Museum Online.
Right:  A tiger swallowtail butterfly (Mamankanois) and a pufferfish (Tanborel).  This is one of 113 pages of drawings from White's explorations, done in pen, ink, graphite and watercolour.  British Museum Online.

He also created the first pictures of the local people.  I find the picture of the native woman from Florida the most striking:

Yeah, those are her tattoos.  I am such a wimp as I can't even bring myself to get one, much less anything this spectacular!

 Although there are also pictures of less friendly locals too:

Skirmish at Bloody Point, Frobisher Bay.  English with the St. George's cross flag, shooting at Inuit on a cliff.  Bet that went well...

White created around 113 pictures of this type, which you can find at the British Library Online. 

Sadly, when the colonists arrived on Roanoke in 1587, they found the previous 107 settlers all gone, with only a skeleton left at the barracks to tell a grim tale.  Of course, this made the colonists want to leave, but the fleet commander refused to sail them all back.  Making the best of a bad situation, the colonists set up shop and embarked on improving relations with the local Croatoan tribe, fearing that other tribes may kill them due to earlier cultural misunderstandings such as accused theft, raids and outright murder.  During this time of improving relations, the first European was born in America -- Virginia Dare.  She was White's granddaughter.

The colonists insisted that White go back to England to ask for support as they felt they were still at severe risk from the locals.  Sure enough, he went back that same year, leaving his family at the Roanoke colony.  However, he was unable to make it back to the colony for nearly three years thanks to a small problem with a massive Spanish Armada that required all the boats in the English Navy to be on hand.  By the time White made it back to the colony in 1590, all that was left were some dismantled buildings and the words "Croatoan" and "Kro" carved into a tree.  No one knows what happened to the colonists or White's family for sure.  It's possible that they were taken in by local tribes, that they died in a raid, or that they were kidnapped.  What is a certainty, however, is that they must have been brave to even consider settling there in the first place.

Edit:  I almost forgot!  If you're interesting in reading a transcript of Hariot's book, you can find it online here:  http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/hariot/hariot.html

Fawkes: He's just this Guy, y'know...

Yeah, I know.  It's the day after Guy Fawkes night, but I have a good reason for posting late:  We were watching stuff explode.

When I lived in the states, I remember patiently explaining that no, we did not celebrate July 4th in England.  Why would we have a "we lost" or "good riddance" day?  But the idea of Bonfire Night, 5th November and Guy Fawkes would draw a look of confusion onto the faces of a lot of folks.  The explanation I used to give ran like this:

Back in 1605, a group of Catholic conspirators decided they wanted to put a Catholic on the throne because they'd had a lot of religious persecution over the years.  So these conspirators decided to blow up Parliament with King James I inside.  One of the conspirators decided he should probably warn his brother-in-law to avoid parliament on 5th November, which led to Guy Fawkes being caught in Parliament's basement with 36 barrels of gunpowder.  So ever since then, the British set off fireworks and burn effigies of Guy Fawkes as a celebration of a plot that failed to kill a king.  [Cue the massive look of confusion].  No, we're not really sure what we're celebrating any more, but everyone likes an excuse to set things on fire and to watch fireworks.  [Cue a sudden light of understanding].

Woodcut of the conspirators, created by Crispijn Van de Passe around 1605.  Fawkes is third from the right.  The chap named Bates on the left was a servant and therefore not important enough to have his first name featured -- everyone else was of a higher class.  Only eight of the thirteen are pictured.  From Wikimedia Commons.

That is pretty much the bare facts of the matter, stripped of history, culture, context and additional information.  Sure, these chaps had very much been subject to persecution -- under Elizabeth I.

 Elizabeth I:  Not nice to Catholics.  Rainbow portrait, ca. 1600, meant to show her agelessness.  

She had passed several laws that saw people executed for their beliefs, often through being hung, drawn and quartered.  James I was her successor and wanted to be more tolerant, stating that he would not persecute Catholics "that will be quiet and give an outward obedience to the law." 

 James I:  Wanted to be nicer to Catholics, considering his mum was one.  Sadly, they tried to blow him and his wife up.  That kind of thing makes a monarch angry.  Ca. 1603-1609.

However, James I did not openly remove any sanctions either -- after all, at the time of the gunpowder plot he was on the throne barely two years.  The plot did nothing to encourage him to be nice to Catholics either.

Guy Fawkes was captured red-handed and held as his majesty's convenience in the Tower of London.  Fawkes was held at some length in a cell called "Little Ease", which was a cell only 4ft long by 4ft high, and only as deep as the wall.  The idea was that it was too small to lie down, stand or sit comfortably.  Of course, that was the least of what happened to Guido Fawkes.  He refused to give his name (John Johnson being the worst false name ever) and his co-conspirators fled, with several dying in a last-stand siege.  After 10 weeks of torture, Guido Fawkes finally signed confessions -- one is so faint and shaky it's just grim, and the other is marginally better, signed eight days later:

 This is your signature on 17th Century Torture:  The signature on the first confession (above) lies below the word "good".  Wikimedia commons.  

This is your signature 8 days after 17th Century Torture:  Still shaky.  Still grim.  Guy Fawkes' signature on the second confession.  National Archives.

All the conspirators faced ugly ends -- those who died before being executed still had their corpses decapitated and placed on Traitor's Gate.  Those who survived the seige got the worst of it; they were hung until nearly dead and then whilst still conscious they were castrated, disemboweled and then quartered.  Ironically, Guy Fawkes had the cleanest death of the lot.  He'd decided that he'd suffered enough, thank you, and so jumped from the scaffold to hang, breaking his neck and cheating the executioner.

The British, being the cheerful people that we are, decided that we would turn all this into a celebration.  Burning effigies of Guy Fawkes became commonplace, and although it's not so common now, I remember as a child seeing other kids making Guys and asking adults for "a penny for the guy" so they could go off and buy fireworks. Thanks to these effigies, the word "guy" also came to mean an oddly dressed man, before becoming used as it is today.

It's got to be said though, as a child, I remember some fantastic Guy Fawkes Nights.  When you're six, all you remember are the fireworks and the poem...

"Remember, remember, the 5th of November,

Gunpowder, treason and plot.

I see no reason why gunpowder treason

Should ever be forgot."

...with the meaning totally lost on you.  But it doesn't matter because you are six, there are fireworks and fireworks are amazing!