Quarter Days and the Settling of Accounts

 

Quarter Days and the Settling of Accountsⁱ

i Quarter Days and the Settling of Accounts

Christmas—the 25th day of December—was also one of the traditional “quarter days” of the English calendar. As I discussed in an earlier episode about the use of the Julian Calendar in early Charleston (see Episode No. 47), our community once marked the passing seasons of the year with four important dates: Lady Day (March 25th) marked the beginning of the year, followed by Midsummer Day (June 24th); then Michaelmas (September 29th), and finally Christmas.

All financial accounts—be it the annual budget of our provincial government, a tenant’s rental contract, or a man’s bar tab at the local pub—were all calculated on a schedule formed around these quarter days. The local newspapers of colonial-era Charleston, for example, frequently reported the quantity of articles exported from South Carolina between, say, Christmas and Midsummer, or the number of enslaved Africans imported between, say, Lady Day and Michaelmas. Even after our community adopted the more accurate Gregorian Calendar in January 1752, Christmas and the other quarter days continued to play an important role in marking the passage of time in Charleston.