loutil wrote:fairman wrote:New year was in spring before year 1567 in France
LOL...that is not correct.
It was in 1563 that King Charles IX reformed the French calendar. It was passed into law by the French Parliament on Dec. 22, 1564. However, all this did was make official what had long been the custom of celebrating the new year on January 1st.
In 1582 Pope Gregory issued a papal decree moving the start of the year to January 1 as well as creating a leap-year system.
According to some sources, there is more to the story:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year%27s_DayIn AD 567, the Council of Tours formally abolished January 1 as the beginning of the year. At various times and in various places throughout medieval Christian Europe, the new year was celebrated on December 25 in honor of the birth of Jesus; March 1 in the old Roman style; March 25 in honor of Lady Day and the Feast of the Annunciation; and on the movable feast of Easter. These days were also astronomically and astrologically significant since, at the time of the Julian reform, March 25 had been understood as the spring equinox and December 25 as the winter solstice. (The Julian calendar's small disagreement with the solar year, however, shifted these days earlier before the Council of Nicaea which formed the basis of the calculations used during the Gregorian reform of the calendar.) Medieval calendars nonetheless often continued to display the months running from January to December, despite their readers reckoning the transition from one year to the next on a different day.
Because of the leap year error in the Julian calendar, the date of Easter had drifted backward since the First Council of Nicaea decided the computation of the date of Easter in 325. By the sixteenth century, the drift from the observed equinox had become unacceptable. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII declared the Gregorian calendar widely used today, correcting the error by a deletion of 10 days. The Gregorian calendar reform also (in effect) restored January 1 as New Year's Day. Although most Catholic countries adopted the Gregorian calendar almost immediately, it was only gradually adopted among Protestant countries. The British, for example, did not adopt the reformed calendar until 1752. Until then, the British Empire – and its American colonies – still celebrated the new year on 25 March.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/April-Fools-DaySome have proposed that the modern custom [of April Fools' Day] originated in France, officially with the Edict of Roussillon (promulgated in August 1564), in which Charles IX decreed that the new year would no longer begin on Easter, as had been common throughout Christendom, but rather on January 1. Because Easter was a lunar and therefore moveable date, those who clung to the old ways were the “April Fools.” Others have suggested that the timing of the day may be related to the vernal equinox (March 21), a time when people are fooled by sudden changes in the weather.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools'_DayIn 1508, French poet Eloy d'Amerval referred to a poisson d’avril (April fool, literally "Fish of April"), possibly the first reference to the celebration in France.[7] Some writers suggest that April Fools' originated because in the Middle Ages, New Year's Day was celebrated on March 25 in most European towns,[8] through a holiday that in some areas of France, specifically, ended on April 1,[9][10] and those who celebrated New Year's Eve on January 1 made fun of those who celebrated on other dates by the invention of April Fools' Day.[9] The use of January 1 as New Year's Day became common in France only by the mid-16th century,[6] and the date was not adopted officially until 1564, thanks to the Edict of Roussillon.