The Medieval Calendar Part II

As I previously stated, in this second part I will explain the meaning some of those columns that look to be random letters and number to the left of the list of Saints’ days.  Usually there are about three or four of these columns.  For the visual example I have chosen a January page from Les Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry.  This example also happens to be one of those deluxe French manuscripts I talked about in part one, so there is a lot more color than one would usually expect to find, but more importantly those four columns happen to be very clear to read.

From Christus Rex

To start with we are going to look at the second column from the left.  This column begins with the letter ‘A,’ goes through to ‘G,’ and then continues to repeat itself.  These are the Dominical Letters, being seven letters, they help one to find all the Sundays and of course the rest of the days of the week.  Every year, the letter for Sunday (and consequently the rest of the days) would move backwards.  On leap years the letter would change twice, the first being on the first of January, and the second time being on the 25th of February.

The two columns to the right of the Dominical Letters are actually read together.  These two columns are a holdover from the ancient Roman calendrical system.  In this system there were only three fixed days in each month.  The first day of the month was kalends (which is where we get our word calendar), then Nones which fell on the fifth or seventh day of each month, and last was the Ides which fell on the thirteenth or fifteenth day of each month.  All the days that fell in between were counted backwards from these fixed points.  For example, Saint Valentine’s Day would not be the fourteenth of February but the sixteenth day before the kalends of March.  Now in a lot of calendars the days of kalends, nones, and ides would have been written out but the days leading up to them would have been abbreviated, kl for kalends, N for nones and Id for ides.  That being said, in the month of February, Saint Valentine’s Day would be written xvi kl.

Finally, we are going to look at the first column from the left.  In this column we will find the Roman numerals I to XIX but they are not in consecutive order and there are gaps in between a lot of the numbers.  These numbers are called Golden Numbers and they indicate when the new moons would occur and then counting up fourteen days would give the day for the full moons throughout the year.  This was particularly important because this would help determine the day on which Easter would fall, which was the most important holy day of the year to the medieval Christian.

Because this section ran a little longer than I anticipated I am going to write about the illustrations that accompanied each month in Part III.

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