Dates

Early English documents are generally not dated. Dating is rare before the thirteenth century. Very few manuscripts had dates, the earliest exception being a volume of the Domesday Book that says it was made in 1086. The king’s letters were not dated until 1189. After that some religious houses began to use dates on important documents. Only gradually did dating extend elsewhere.

There were many reasons for not dating documents. The role of a document as memorializing a transaction took time to be understood; pre-literate practice relied on memory, and there was no reason to date a document since the people involved could remember when the transaction occurred. The date of the document was arbitrary, anyway, since it was rarely the date of the transaction. And the religious houses were apparently reluctant to use their anno domini system, developed in the fourth century, on secular documents.

There was also the problem of how to date. There were, in England as elsewhere, several different ways of identifying a year:

1. by era, e.g., the year anno domini;

2. as a regnal year (the number of years that a given ruler had reigned, e.g., 16 Hen. VIII);

3. by the indiction (a Byzantine system that was still used in some church documents);

4. by reference to a contemporaneous significant event (the pre-literate method)

Once the year was picked, the day of the year could be indicated by the modern system of day of the month or by the day of a religious event, e.g., a saint’s day or feast. (The Roman system, which numbered days by how far they were in advance of certain marker days, was still known in southern Europe but was not used in civil documents in England.) At first the style used was complex and inconsistent. During the thirteenth century most sophisticated documents (i.e., those produced by experienced scribes in the royal government or religious houses) pretty much settled on identifying the year by regnal year and the day by religious event. Internally, however, the church continued to use anno domini and the Chancery the day of the month.

In the Roman system there were three marker days in the month: the kalends, the nones, and the ides. The kalends was the first of the month, the nones the fifth or seventh, depending on the month, and the ides the thirteenth or fifteenth. (The Latin months with 31 days — March, July, October, and May —

used the later dates for the nones and ides.) So, for example, the "ides of March" was the Roman name for the day we call March 15. Other days were numbered by relationship to these marker days. March 10, for example, was "six days before the ides of March," abbreviated "a.d. [ante diem, "before the day"] VI id. Mar." (often without the "a.d."). (The tenth was six days before the fifteenth because ancient systems of counting included the first and last day.) All the other days had similar numbers except, in classical Latin, for the day before the marker day, which was called "the day before" ("pridie", abbreviated pr.), e.g., pr. id. Mar. (March 14); in Medieval Latin "II id. Mar." was also used.

The marker days originated in the days when the Romans used a lunar calendar. As with many of their traditions, the Romans held on to this one without really remembering why they did it in the first place. The ides was the time of the full moon; the word came from the Etruscan word for "half," since the full moon comes halfway through the lunar month. "Kalends" comes from a word meaning "proclaim," from the lunar-calendar practice of proclaiming the start of the month when the first sliver of the gibbous moon can be seen. "Nones," from Latin for "nine," simply means nine days before the ides.