The Church’s Year, as it has been known for many centuries throughout Christendom, is characterised, first, by the weekly festival of the Lord’s Day (a feature which dates from the dawn of the Church’s life and the age of the Apostles) and, secondly, by the annual recurrence of fasts and festivals, of certain days and certain seasons of religious observance. These latter emerged, and came to find places in the Kalendar at various periods.

In order of time the season of the Pascha, the commemoration of the death, and, subsequently, of the resurrection of the Saviour, is the first of the annual observances to appear in history. Again, at an early date local commemorations of the deaths of victims of the great persecutions under the pagan Emperors were observed yearly. And some of these (notably those who suffered at Rome) gradually gained positions in the Church’s Year in regions remote from the places of their origin. Speaking generally, little as it might be thought probable beforehand, it is a fact that martyrs of local celebrity emerge in the history of the Kalendar at an earlier date than any but the most eminent of the Apostles (who were also martyrs), and earlier than some of the festivals of the Lord Himself. The Kalendar had its origin in the historical events of the martyrdoms.

So far the growth of the Kalendar was the outcome of natural and spontaneous feeling. But at a later time we have manifest indications of artificial constructiveness, the laboured studies of the cloister, and the work of professional martyrologists and Kalendar-makers. To take, for the purpose of illustration, an extreme case, it is obvious that the assignment of days in the Kalendar of the Eastern Church to Trophimus, Sosipater and Erastus, Philemon and Archippus, Onesimus, Agabus, Rufus, Asyncretus, Phlegon, Hermas, the woman of Samaria (to whom the name Photina was given), and other persons whose names occur in the New Testament, is the outcome of deliberate and elaborate constructiveness. The same is true of the days of Old Testament Patriarchs and Prophets, once, in a measure, a feature of Western, as they are still of Eastern Kalendars. But even all the festivals of our Lord, save the Pascha, though doubtless suggested by a spontaneous feeling of reverence, could be assigned to particular days of the year only after some processes of investigation and inference, or of conjecture. Whether the birthday of the Founder of the Christian religion should be placed on January 6 or on December 25 was a matter of debate and argument. Commentators on the history of the Gospels, the conjectures of interpreters of Old Testament prophecy, and such information as might be fancied to be derivable from ancient annals, had of necessity to be considered. The assignment of the feast of the Nativity to a particular day was a product of the reflective and constructive spirit.

It is not absolutely impossible that ancient tradition, if not actual record, may be the source of June 29 being assigned for the martyrdom of St Peter and St Paul; but a more probable origin of the date is that it marks the translation of relics. Certainly the days of most of the Apostles (considered as the days of their martyrdoms) have little or no support from sources that have any claim to be regarded as historical. They find their places but gradually, and, it would seem, as the result of a resolve that none of them should be forgotten.

Commemorations which mark the definition of a dogma, or which originated in the special emphasis given at some particular epoch to certain aspects of popular belief and sentiment, have all appeared at times well within the ken of the historical student. Thus, ‘Orthodoxy Sunday’ (the first Sunday in Lent) in the Kalendar of the Greek Church is but little concerned with the controversies on the right faith which occupied the great Councils of the fourth and fifth centuries. It commemorates the triumph of the party that secured the use of images over the iconoclasts; this was the ‘orthodoxy’ which was chiefly celebrated; and we can fix the date of the establishment of the festival as A.D. 842. Again, the commemoration of All Souls in the West was the outcome of a growing sense of the need of prayers and masses on behalf of the faithful departed. The ninth century shows traces of the observance of some such day; but it was not till the close of the tenth century, under the special impetus supplied by the reported visions of a pilgrim from Jerusalem, who declared that he had seen the tortures of the souls suffering purgatorial fire, that the observance made headway. We then find Nov. 2 assigned for the festival, which came to be gradually and slowly adopted. The feast of Corpus Christi, which now figures so largely in the popular devotions of several countries of Europe, and is marked as a ‘double of the first class’ in the service-books of the Church of Rome, emerges for the first time in the thirteenth century, and was not formally enjoined till the fourteenth. The feast of the Conception of St Mary the Virgin seems to have originated in the East, and to have been simply a historical commemoration, even as the Greeks commemorate the conception of St John the Baptist. The Eastern tradition represents Anna as barren and well stricken in years, when, in answer to her prayers and those of Joachim her spouse, God revealed to them by an angel that they should have a child. This conception was according to the Greek Menology ‘contrary to the laws of nature,’ like that of the Baptist. In the West the festival of the Conception appears at the end of the eleventh or beginning of the twelfth century. The controversies as to its doctrinal significance form part of the history of dogma, and are full of instruction: but they cannot be considered here. Up to the year 1854 the name of the festival in the Kalendars of the authorised service-books of the Roman Church was simply Conceptio B. Mariae Virginis. It was as recently as Dec. 8, 1854, by an ordinance of Pope Pius IX, that the name was changed into Immaculata Conceptio B. Mariae Virginis. It will thus be seen how changes in the Kalendar illustrate the changes and accretions of dogma, facts which are further exhibited by the changes in the rank and dignity of festivals of this kind, at first only tolerated perhaps, and of local usage, but eventually enjoined as of universal obligation, and elevated in the order and grade of festal classification. Again, the considerable number of festivals of the Greek and Russian Churches connected with relics and wonder-working icons throws a light on the intellectual standpoint and the current beliefs in these ancient branches of the Catholic Church.

Not less instructive in exhibiting the extraordinary growth in the cultus of the Blessed Virgin in the West are the inferences which may be gathered from a knowledge of the fact that no festival of the Virgin was celebrated in the Church of Rome before the seventh century, when we compare the crowd of festivals, major and minor, devoted to the Virgin in the Roman Kalendar of to-day. But considerations of this kind are only incidentally touched on in the following pages; and they are referred to here simply with a view to show that the study of the Kalendar is not an enquiry interesting merely to dry-as-dust antiquaries, but one which is intimately connected with the study of the history of belief, and is inwoven with far-reaching issues.

In the enquiry into the origins of ecclesiastical observances the discovery within recent years of early documents, hitherto unknown in modern days, enforces the obvious thought that our conceptions on such subjects must be liable to re-adjustment from time to time in the light of new evidence. Until the day comes, if it ever comes, when it can be said with truth that the materials supplied by the early manuscripts of the East and West have been exhausted, there can be no finality. The document discovered some ten or twelve years ago, in which a lady from Gaul or Spain, who had gone on pilgrimage to the East, records her impressions of religious observances which she had witnessed at Jerusalem towards the close of the fourth century, has furnished some important light on the subject before us, as well as on the history of ceremonial. In the following pages this document is referred to as the Pilgrimage of Silvia (‘Peregrinatio Silviae’), without prejudice to the question relating to the true name of the writer. The period when the work was written is the important question for our purposes; and those who are most competent to express an opinion consider that it belongs to the time of Theodosius the Great, and to a date between the years 383 and 394.

The influence of the early mediaeval martyrologists, Bede, Florus, Ado, and Usuard, upon the mediaeval Kalendars, is unquestionable; but the relations of their works to one another, the variations of the different recensions and the sources from which they were drawn, are still subjects of investigation. In addition to the brief notices of the martyrologists which will be found in the following pages, the enquirer who desires further information should not fail to study with care the recent treatise of Dom Henri Quentin, of Solesmes, Les Martyrologes historiques.

Of necessity a general outline sketch of the formation of the Kalendar is all that can be attempted in the following pages. Local Kalendars, more especially, for most of our readers, those of the service-books of England, Scotland, and Ireland, present many interesting and attractive features; but it has been impossible to deal with them in an adequate manner. Some space has, however, been devoted to the consideration of the Kalendar and Ecclesiastical Year of the Orthodox Church of the East, including the peculiar arrangement of the grouping of Sundays; and brief notices are given of the fasts and festivals of some of the separated Churches of the East.

The questions concerning the determination of Easter will form the main trial of the patience of the student.

The early controversies on the Paschal question are not free from obscurity; and the interests attaching to the construction of the various systems of cycles, intended to form a perpetual table for the unerring determination of the date of Easter, are mainly the interests which are awakened by the history of human ingenuity grappling more or less successfully with a problem which called for astronomical knowledge and mathematical skill. Religious interests are not touched even remotely. Profound as are the thoughts and emotions which cluster around the commemoration of the Lord’s Resurrection, they are quite independent of any considerations connected with the age of the moon and the date of the vernal equinox. The scheme for a time seriously entertained by Gregory XIII of making the celebration of Easter to fall on a fixed Sunday, the same in every year, has much to commend it. Had it been adopted we should, at all events, have been spared many practical inconveniences, and the ecclesiastical computists would have been saved a vast amount of labour. But we must take things as they are.

If anyone contends that the safest ‘Rule for finding Easter’ is ‘Buy a penny almanack,’ I give in a ready assent. It has in principle high ecclesiastical precedent; for it was exactly the same reasonable plan of accepting the determinations of those whom one has good reason to think competent authorities, which in ancient times made the Christian world await the pronouncements as to the date of Easter which came year by year from the Patriarchs of Alexandria in their Paschal Epistles: while for the date of Easter in any particular year in the distant past, or in the future, there are few who will not prefer the Tables supplied in such works as L’Art de vÉrifier les Dates, or Mas Latrie’s TrÉsor de Chronologie, to any calculations of their own, based on the Golden Numbers and Sunday Letters[1]. In the present volume the limits of space forbid any detailed discussion of the principles involved and the methods employed in the determination of Easter by the computists both ancient and modern. A brief historical sketch of the successive reforms of the Kalendar is all that has been found possible. Those who seek for fuller information can resort to the treatises mentioned above or in the course of the volume. The chapter on Easter has for convenience been placed near the conclusion of this volume.

In dealing with both Eastern and Western Kalendars the student will bear in mind that only comparatively few of the festivals affected the life of the great body of the faithful. A very large number of festivals were marked in the services of the Church by certain liturgical changes or additions. Many of them had their special propria; others were grouped in classes; and each class had its own special liturgical features. Only comparatively few made themselves felt outside the walls of the churches. Some of them carried a cessation from servile labour, or caused the closing of the law courts, or, as chiefly in the Greek Church, mitigated in various degrees (according to the dignity of the festival) the rigour of fasting. The distinction between festa chori and festa fori is always worthy of observation. A relic of the distinction is preserved in an expression of common currency in France, when one speaks of a person as of insignificant importance, C’est un saint qu’on ne chÔme pas.

Although the general scope of the following pages is wide in intention, the origins of the Kalendar and the rise of the principal seasons and days of observance have chiefly attracted the interest of the writer. Later developments are not wholly neglected, but they occupy a subordinate place.

The enactments of civil legislation under the Christian Emperors and other rulers, in respect to the observance of Sunday and other Christian holy days, is an interesting field of study; but it has been impossible to enter upon it here in view of the limits of space at our disposal.

The study of Kalendars brings one into constant contact with hagiology, the acts of martyrs, and the lives of saints. It would however have been obviously vain to deal seriously in the present volume with so vast a subject, even in broadest outline.

A short Bibliography of some important or serviceable works dealing with various branches of the subject before us is prefixed.