- Lady Day
:dablink|"Lady Day" is also a nickname given to
Billie Holiday In theChristian calendar , Lady Day is the Feast of theAnnunciation (25 March ) and the first of the four traditional Irish and Englishquarter days . The "Lady" was theVirgin Mary . The term derives fromMiddle English , when some nouns lost theirgenitive inflections. "Lady" would later gain an -s genitive ending, and therefore the name means "Lady's day."Non-Religious Significance
In England, Lady Day was
New Year's Day up to1752 when, following the move from theJulian Calendar to theGregorian Calendar ,1 January became the start of the year. A vestige of this remains in theUnited Kingdom 's tax year, which starts on6 April , i.e. Lady Day adjusted for the "lost days" of the calendar change (until this change Lady Day had been used as the start of the legal year).As a year-end and
quarter day that conveniently did not fall within or between the seasons for plowing and harvesting, Lady Day was a traditional day on which year-long contracts between landowners and tenant farmers would begin and end in England and nearby lands (although there were regional variations). Farmers' time of "entry" into new farms and onto new fields was often this day [Adams, Leonard P. "Agricultural Depression and Farm Relief in England, 1813-1852" Reviewed in "Journal of the Royal Statistical Society", 95(4):735-737 (1932)] ["The Tenant League v. Common Sense" "Irish Quarterly Review" 1(1):25-45 (March, 1851)] . As a result, farming families who were changing farms would travel from the old farm to the new one on Lady Day. After the calendar change, "Old Lady Day" (April 6), the former date of the Annunciation, largely assumed this role. The date is significant in some of the works ofThomas Hardy , "e.g.", "Tess of the D'Urbervilles " and "Far From the Madding Crowd ".The logic of using Lady Day as the start of the year is that it reckons years
A.D. from the moment of the Incarnation, which is considered to take place at the moment of the conception of Jesus at the Annunciation rather than at the moment of his birth at Christmas. See alsoNew Year .References
ee also
*
International Women's Day -8 March
*Mother's Day
*Mothering Sunday
*National Women's Day
*Fiscal Year
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