What's the point of Monday?

The Norman knights prepared their longswords and the English archers fletched their arrows on a Saturday morning, prior to the Battle of Hastings. It seems strange to think of a battle taking place on a particular day of the week, such was the weight of the occasion. On that particular Saturday – late in the afternoon, about the time when we now get the football scores – one English king was killed in battle and a foreign invader claimed the throne.

For how long have we measured time in days, weeks and months; and what was life like before? On which day of the week did the momentous events of our history take place, and on which day were the great and the good born?

Thenames for the days are a hot-potch, the majority of which come from the Romans. Sunday and Monday are the exception: in Northern European languages Sunday is the day of the sun, sune dai, whereas in the Latin countries it is the Lord’s Day, from dies Dominicus, dimanche. Monday is the day of the Moon, Luna, la lune, lundi.

The other days are named after gods: Tuesday (Tiw, the god of single combat and victory) is also Mars’ day (mardi in French). Wednesday belongs to Woden (the Norse god of all things) and Mercury (mercredi). Thursday is for Thor (Thunder god) and Jove or Jupiter (jeudi). Friday is for Frigg or Freja, the Roman equivalent being Venus (vendredi). Saturday is for Saturn. It is significant that the Southern European countries (France, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Romania) retained their Latin names, whereas in Northern Europe the names have been over-laid or replaced in part by Norse deities. Perhaps the Roman administrators found a name for each day useful so that taxes could be collected on particular dates, and the Vikings ran with the idea. Is it Tuesday? Let’s sack another monastery, or invade Ireland.

Common to all European cultures is the special significance of Sunday. Even the simplest agrarian economies downed tools once each week and rested, and gave the day to prayer. We have a strange mix of Saturday and Sunday in this, as the Jewish Shabbat has been mis-appropriated to mean Sunday’s Sabbath whereas in fact the Jewish holy day is Saturday. The confusion arises from the Council ofLaodicea (AD 336), which changed the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday. Constantine is to blame.

The idea of Saturday as a day of leisure is a modern invention: at the end of the Victorian Era in the UK, labour laws were changed and the 1847 and 1850 Factory Acts first gave people Saturday afternoon off. It is no surprise that the growth of sporting activity in the working class began to grow at this time. The English FA Cup, the oldest football competition in the world, began in 1872.

Sporting convention means that most great matches and competitions have happened on a Saturday (the FA Cup Final, most major Rugby internationals until the Twenty-First Century), a Wednesday (the European Cup Final and Champions’ League, until recently), and Sunday (The FIFA World Cup Final, the Wimbledon Men’s Final, The Superbowl, and so on).

There seems to be no particularly expedient day of the week to go to war, in case you are planning a land war in Asia. D-Day was a Tuesday. Rorke’s Drift was a Wednesday, and Waterloo was a Sunday. What is obvious is that most of the dates that are certain in Western History are those of battles, the start of wars, massacres or disasters. It is pretty certain that Hastings took place on 14^th October, which is unusually precise considering how long ago it was. Harold Godwineson (he of arrow fame) was born about 1020-22, and William the Conqueror about 1027/28. Nobody bothered to note down the exact day. The English Kings from 1066 onwards are well documented, especially if they were part of an established dynasty. There is uncertainty for those born who had no idea of their future greatness. For example, William the Conqueror’s children are well recorded, but the usurper Stephen of Blois was born ‘about 1092 or 96’.

Do you know on which day you were born? By far the loveliest tool online for all calendars and all things related to time is timeanddate.com

It can provide a calendar for any year, has details about time zones, and a very useful tool that tells the elapsed time between any two dates. You can even calculate the date in five hundred days, or a thousand days (useful for long-term diet targets) and when your life will be ten thousand days old. I have already wasted many of my allotted days on such things. For example, I will reach my twenty thousandth day in the summer of 2028.

A quick search for the calendar of your year of birth will tell you on which day you were born. With whom do you share your day?

Monday'schild is fair of face:

Winston Churchill, Queen Victoria, Walt Whitman, Cary Grant, Mark Twain, John McEnroe, Mikhail Gorbachev

Tuesday's child is full of grace:

Martin Luther King, Jr., JFK, Henry VIII, Neil Armstrong, Margaret Thatcher, Marilyn Monroe, Pablo Picasso, Napoleon, Justin Bieber, Dave Grohl, Elvis Presley

Wednesday's child is full of woe:

Stalin, Babe Ruth, Pele, John Lennon, Queen Elizabeth II, Vincent Van Gogh, Desmond Tutu

Thursday's child has far to go:

Paul McCartney, Pope Francis, Nelson Mandela, Thomas Edison

Friday's child is loving and giving:

Charles Dickens, Michael Jackson, Oprah Winfrey, Marlene Dietrich, Barack Obama, Beyoncé Knowles, Bill Gates, Albert Einstein

Saturday's child works hard for a living:

Adolf Hitler, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jane Austen, Madonna, George Clooney, Claude Monet, Dalai Lama, Muhammad Ali

But the child who is born on the Sabbath day

Is fair and wise and good in every way:

Henry Kissinger, David Cameron, Abraham Lincoln

The seven day week is a strange construction, but one that is dear to us. The last people to try to change it were the French Republicans. Their revolution of thecalendar lasted a mere twelve years, because nobody else wanted to join in. I think part of the distaste might have been the fact that a ten day week meant a long, long wait for the weekend…