1940 IS LEAP YEAR

Press, Volume LXXVI, Issue 22907, 2 January 1940, Page 1 (Supplement)

1940 IS LEAP YEAR

"MAYDEN LADYES" MAY TAKE INITIATIVE

STRANGE OLD CUSTOM AND STATUTE

The chief claim to distinction of 1940 here is that it is New Zealand's Centennial year. A secondary claim is that it is a Leap Year, so that it will contain 366 days instead of the normal 365.

It is called "Leap Year" because, by the insertion of the extra day, February 2.9, a date leaps over a day of the week. For instance, Christmas Day last year was on a Monday;* this year it will be on a Wednesday, leaping over the intervening Tuesday. Of the custom for women to woo during Leap Year no satisfactory explanation has ever been offered. In 1288 a law was enacted in Scotland that "it is statut and ordaint that during the rein of hir maist blissit Megeste, for ilk yeare known as lepe yeare, ilk mayden ladye of bothe highe and lowe estait shall hae liberte to bespeke ye man she likes, albeit he refuses to taik hir to be his lawful wyfe, he shall be mulcted in ye sum ane poundis or less, as his estait may be; except and awis gif he can make it appeare that he is betroith'it ane ither woman he then shall be free." A few years later a like law was passed in France, and in the fifteenth century the custom was legalised in Genoa and Florence. Cold statistical records, in New Zealand at any rate, do not show that "mayden ladyes of bothe highe and lowe estait" take much advantage of Leap Year, or that there are any more marriages than in ordinary years. Leap Year as it is known to-day first figured in the calendar as long ago as B.C. 46, when Julius Caesar reformed the calendar. He was troubled by the fact that the solar year consists of approximately six hours over the 365 days. So he took four of these odd six-hour periods and combined them with an extra day once every four years. Even then the calendar did not come quite right, for the solar year is really only 365 days 5 hours 49 minutes long. So to keep things right there are no leap years, at the ends of the centuries, except every fourth. The years 1700. 1800, 1900 for instance,' were not leap years, but 2000 will Perhaps by then "mayden ladyes" will have long ago asserted their right to choose their own husbands, and the matrimonial significance of the year 2000 will then be lost.