The universe likes to keep itself in balance, and to make up for the large number of technology-related posts found on this weblog, PDW has been drawn to write this history-related post.
The change in calendar is a constant pain for historians working before the changeover, and especially for those working after the change. It doesn’t help that the start of the year under the old system was not 1st January, so that translation of old-style dates to modern ones becomes complex for the mathematically challenged. Nor does it help that for many years on either side of the official change in calendar, people decided to date their private papers according to the old or new style dates as fancy, and fashion, took them, sometimes without much logic or consistency.