Give us our eleven days: a protest that only ever happened in a painting
On 2 September 1752 Britain went to bed and woke up on the 14th. Eleven days were gone, cut by an act of Parliament to match the rest of Europe.
The story everyone repeats is a crowd in the street shouting “Give us our eleven days.” That shout has two sources. One is a satirical journal. The other is a painting: Hogarth's An Election Entertainment, made three years later about a different election, where the phrase sits on a Tory placard trampled underfoot on a tavern floor.
In 1995 the historian Robert Poole went looking for the riot. The riot depositions at the Public Record Office hold no record of it. The line that sounds like a crowd's voice is a cartoon.
What the surviving documents show is arithmetic, not anger. Rents, wages, quarter days. The act moved payment dates eleven days forward so nobody lost by the change. That is why the British tax year still ends on 5 April.
Checked in: Calendar (New Style) Act 1750, section 1; Poole, “'Give us our eleven days!'”, Past and Present 149 (1995).
One question: what is a fact you hear often and have never once seen the source for? Bring me something you half-know, and I bring back the true detail, checked against the source.
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