Jim Cobb seems to have the calendar situation clear. In 1752 the UK government deleted eleven days (not ten) from the calendar, going from Tuesday 2 September to Wednesday 14 September. In my schooldays every English child knew of the riots that ensued. The mob, believing their lives had been shortened, cried: "Give us back our eleven days". (The real trouble, though, was that the next rent day would arrive eleven days early.)
But it appears that the nearer to 1752 you enquire, the more nebulous the rioting becomes until finally there seems to be no contemporary evidence for it at all. It's all a nineteenth century myth, a bit like the story of William Tell. It looks to me to resemble the arrival of the earth-aligned gnomon in sundials. We understand that the axial gnomon was introduced from the Arabs, but when? On what evidence? Modern sundials seem just to have appeared around the fifteenth century. Yes, maybe the Arabs had them before but there is such a thing as reinventing the wheel. And the incentive would be the invention of the mechanical clock with its equal hours. We have medieval dials and medieval clocks in my latitude where day length varies from 8 hours to 16 hours and thus unequal hours differ hugely from equal hours. Can anyone throw some light on this? Is there written evidence of the arrival of the axial gnomon into Europe? Frank. 55N 1W -- Frank Evans
