Barnaby Bright

by John Dee, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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I set this down at Mortlake, in the order in which it happened, because it touches the reformation of the year, and anything that touches the reformation of the year belongs in the record.

That winter my discourse on the vulgar Julian year had gone to my Lord Treasurer. It ran to sixty-two leaves, ruled and coloured, with the tables in red and black. I had shown in it that the year of Julius is too long by eleven minutes and some seconds, and that those minutes, added together over sixteen hundred years, have carried the calendar eleven days away from the sun. The Bishop of Rome had cut ten days out of October last and called it a reformation. I said ten was a compromise with the Council of Nicaea, and that a Christian prince who wished to set the year where it stood at the birth of Christ must cut eleven. I also said they should not be cut all at once, which frightens people, but two or three at a time, out of the months from May to September, when the roads are dry and the courts are not sitting and the least harm is done.

There is a joke in the date of the discourse itself, though I did not make it. I had written 1582 on the title, because in England the year turns at Lady Day and it was still February. Every astronomer beyond the sea would have written 1583. The book that was meant to mend the year could not be dated without two numbers. I took that as a reason to hurry.

My Lord Treasurer passed the discourse to three learned men, Master Digges, Master Savile and Master Chamber. They found the arithmetic sound, and they advised ten days, not eleven, so that English merchants should not be one day out from Antwerp for ever after. I gave way. A man who has spent his life proving that number governs the world may allow that it also governs trade. The draft then went to the Archbishop, who was blind by then and very ill, and he called the other bishops to consider it.

While it was with them the waterman's wife came to me.

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Her name was Joan Pasfield. Her husband Hugh rowed between Mortlake and the Old Swan stairs, and he had once carried a crate of my books for me and asked for nothing but a look at the globe. I knew her by sight from the church. She came to the door in the second week of March in a wet hood. My servant would have sent her to the kitchen, but she said that she had business with the Doctor about the days. He brought her to the room where I keep the instruments, because the fire was there.

She would not sit down. She stood just inside the door with her hands under her apron and looked once at the armillary sphere and then away from it, as people look away from a man with a wound.

"They say in the village you are going to take days out of the year, Master Doctor."

I told her that I had advised Her Majesty on the matter, and that nothing was decided.

"Which days?"

I said the plan was to shorten May, and June, and the summer months after them, by two or three days apiece.

She took this in. Then she asked whether June would lose the eleventh.

I did not see what she meant. I said that it depended on the scheme the Council chose, but that in my own scheme the days left out of June would be at its end, not its beginning. I offered to show her the table. She said she could not read it. Then she told me why she had come, standing in the doorway with the rain running out of her hood onto my floor.

Her son had been born on St Barnabas's Day, in the year of Our Lord 1581. They had named him Robert. He died in the January following, of a fever that went through the riverside that winter, and he was buried in our churchyard on the north side. She said that she kept his day. She did not mean anything popish by it, she said quickly, and I believed her. She meant that on Barnaby's Day she did no washing, and she went up to the north side after supper while it was still light, because it was light so long on Barnaby's Day, and she sat there.

"Barnaby bright," she said. "The longest day and the shortest night. That is his. And now they say the Doctor will take it out of the year."

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I ought to say what I knew and she did not, because it bears on what I did.

The rhyme is true. In this year of grace St Barnabas's Day falls on the eleventh of June, and on or about the eleventh of June the sun stands at its greatest height above our horizon and makes the longest day. The country people have watched it so for generations, and they are right. But it is true only because the calendar is wrong. At the birth of Christ the longest day fell near the twenty-fourth of June, on the feast of the Baptist. The Fathers made much of that. St John was born when the days begin to shorten, and Christ when they begin to lengthen, and so he must increase, but I must decrease is written in the sun before it is written in the Gospel. The Julian surplus has dragged the solstice back from the Baptist to Barnabas, a day every hundred and thirty years or thereabouts. If the year were mended as I had asked, the longest day would go back to St John's, where it stood when the Gospel was written, and Barnaby would become an ordinary day in June, some minutes of light short of the summit and falling.

So she had the matter backwards and also exactly right. I was not going to take away the eleventh of June. I was going to take away the sun from the eleventh of June. The rhyme her son had been born under would become false, and in a generation nobody would know why the old people said it.

I did not tell her all of this. I asked her first how she knew he had been born on Barnaby's Day.

She did not understand the question, and I put it to her again, more gently, because it was a fair question and I am obliged to ask it. The parish book records christenings and burials. It does not record births. Robert Pasfield's christening would be written there, with a date, but the day of his birth rested on her word alone.

She looked at me for some time.

"The bell rang for Barnaby," she said. "Matins. I heard it when the pains started. And he came at night, and it was still light in the west past nine o'clock when Hugh went for the woman, and it was light again before three. You can ask Hugh. You can ask the woman."

I did not need to ask them. She had given me two witnesses, the church bell and the sun. They were independent of each other, and either would have served. That is more than I have had at certain other tables in this house, where I have built a great deal on one witness and could not have produced a second for any money. I have thought about that more often since than I would wish to.

Above us someone was walking up and down. That was the man who at that time called himself Talbot. He had been with me a year, and we had an action appointed for the afternoon. I listened to him walk for a moment. Then I told my servant to tell Master Talbot that I would be late, and I put on my cloak.

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The Pasfields' house stood on the lane behind the brewhouse. It had one room below and a loft over it, and the floor was beaten earth. The south wall faced the lane. It had one window, shuttered with an elm board that had a knot in it. I stood in the room and looked at the board, and I saw that what I wanted was already more than half there.

I will set the method down exactly, so that anyone can repeat it.

A small hole in a south shutter lets in a spot of sunlight, and at noon that spot falls on a line on the floor running due north and south. On every day of the year the noon spot falls somewhere on that line. In winter, when the sun is low, it falls far into the room. In summer, when the sun is high, it falls near the foot of the wall. On the day the sun is highest it falls nearest the wall of all, and then it stops and goes back. Solstitium, the sun's standing. Every other point on the line is touched twice a year, once as the sun climbs and once as it comes down. Only the two ends are touched once. The point nearest the wall belongs to one day alone.

That one day is not set by any council. The bishops cannot move it. Neither can I.

I asked Joan Pasfield for an awl and a candle. She brought them, and then she stood against the cold hearth with her arms folded and watched me as if I were a tinker she did not trust with the pot.

The knot in the board was loose. I pushed it out, which left a hole too big for my purpose, so I covered it with a piece of horn from the lantern, tacked down at the corners. Through the horn I made a hole with the heated awl, the size of a pease. I measured from the hole to the floor with my own rule. It came to five feet, once I had allowed for the slope of the earth. That was good fortune, and I make no more of it than that.

Next I needed the meridian. On a clear day I could have taken it from the sun, marking the ends of a shadow at two equal lengths, one before noon and one after, and halving the angle between them. But it was raining, and it went on raining. I had my compass in the cloak, and the needle does not point to the true north. It points east of it, by eleven degrees and a quarter at London, as Master Borough found by careful observation at Limehouse three years ago. I laid the compass on the floor beneath the window and allowed the eleven and a quarter. Then I stretched her clothes line along the earth from the wall into the room and pegged it.

Eleven again, I thought. I did not write that down at the time. I am writing it down now because, in fairness to the record, I noticed it. Number is a bridge, and not every coincidence on it is a message. A man who builds his life on proportion has to keep in mind that the world also contains accidents.

Then came the reckoning, which I did on the back of her husband's tally board with a piece of chalk. Mortlake stands at fifty-one degrees and somewhat less than a half of north latitude. Take that from the quadrant and you have the height of the equator above our horizon, thirty-eight and a half degrees, near enough. Add the sun's greatest declination northward, which Copernicus gives as twenty-three degrees and twenty-eight minutes. That gives the sun's height at noon on the longest day, sixty-two degrees with a few minutes either side. The tangent of sixty-two degrees is a little under two times the radius. Divide the height of the hole, sixty inches, by that, and you have thirty-two inches, less the breadth of a hair. So on the longest day the spot of sun would fall on her clothes line two feet and eight inches out from the foot of the south wall.

I explained it to her as I went. She understood more of it than she let me see. When I said the highest the sun goes, she said "the shortest shadow", without being asked, and she was right.

There was a broken roofing slate by the door. I asked whether I might have it, and she nodded. I trimmed it with the awl into a strip about a hand long and set it into the earth floor across the clothes line, two feet and eight inches out, edge up, level with the earth. Then I cut a line across it with the point of my knife, true east and west.

"There," I said. "When the sun is at its highest it will come through the horn and lie on that line at noon. It will not come nearer the wall than that on any day of the year. On that day you will know, without any almanac or bell or bishop, that it is the longest day. Whatever they write on the paper."

She looked at the slate and then up at the shutter.

"And if they take the days out? Will it still come on Barnaby?"

So I had to tell her the rest after all. I told her that if the year was mended, the paper would call that noon the twenty-first or twenty-second of June. It would not be Barnaby. It would be within two days of the Baptist.

She said nothing for a while.

"Then which is his day," she said. "The one on the paper or the one on the floor?"

There are questions that the learned are trained not to hear. This was a better question than most I am asked at court. I gave her the answer I believe. I believed it then, and I believe it still, though it stands against my own interest.

"The one on the floor," I said. "The paper is a copy of the sun, Mistress Pasfield, and the copy has been made badly. Sixteen hundred years of clerks have each let a few minutes slip, and the copy has wandered. The sun has not wandered. Your son was born on the night of the longest day. That is what you have kept all this time under the name of Barnaby. The day itself does not belong to Barnabas, or to Rome, or to me. It belongs to the sun's standing, and you have it now, there."

I am not sure she was persuaded. She took the chalked tally board out of my hands, looked at my figures, which she could not read, and set it face down on the table, as a woman will turn a looking-glass to the wall in a house where someone has died.

Then she asked whether she owed me anything. I said she did not. She said that Hugh would take my books up to the Swan any time I liked for nothing, and I said I would remember it, and I have.

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The bishops gave their answer in the spring. They would not have the reformation. I was not told their reasons in full. What was told me amounted to this: a change that brought England into line with the Bishop of Rome's calendar, by ten days or by eleven, would be taken by the people for a submission to Rome, whatever the astronomers said. Master Digges and Master Savile and Master Chamber had found my arithmetic sound. The arithmetic was not in question. Nobody denied that the sun had moved on the paper. They declined to move the paper after it.

I have been told that this was a defeat for me, and I will not quarrel with the word. My discourse is in the Treasurer's closet and will stay there. The equinox will go on creeping back through March, a day every hundred and thirty years. Easter will be reckoned from it as if it had not moved. Some grandson of some bishop will have to do in a hurry and with a great deal of shouting what might have been done in my time, quietly and in summer. I am not proud of how much this angered me. I sat at my table with the letter that night, and did not go up to the action, and Master Talbot sent down word that the stone was dark and asked whether that was my doing. I wrote in my book that the stone was dark. I recorded it, as I record everything.

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I went down the lane behind the brewhouse on the eleventh of June, because I wished to see whether the slate was where the sun was. I am a geometer. I do not trust a reckoning I have not checked against the heavens, and I had chalked that one on a tally board in the rain.

The day was fair. The bell had rung for Barnaby in the morning. Joan Pasfield did not invite me in, but she left the door open and stood back from it, which I took for invitation. She had swept the floor. The clothes line had long since gone back to its proper use, but she had scratched its course into the earth with a stick and kept the scratch fresh. There were rushes laid along the edges so that nobody would tread on it.

The spot came through the horn a little before noon, small and round and very bright in the dark room. It moved slowly along the scratched line toward the wall. You can see a thing like that move if you are patient, but only just. Neither of us spoke. Hugh Pasfield came in from the lane, saw us both looking at the floor, took off his cap and stood still with it in his hands.

It reached the slate. It lay across my knife-cut with half of itself on either side, and there it stopped.

I knew, as she did not, that it had not really stopped. It had come within a straw's width of the line the day before. It would be within a straw's width the day after, and the day after that, because at the solstice the sun's height scarcely changes for several days together. That is what the word means, and that is why the ancients could never agree to the hour when it fell. Her son's day was in truth three or four days wide, wider than any calendar would allow, and the light lay on it without moving.

She knelt down on the swept earth beside the slate and put her hand flat on the floor beside the spot, without touching it.

Then I went back up the lane, because Master Talbot was waiting, and the stone, and there was a great deal still to record.

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THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ā Iōanne Dee Londīnēnsī per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

John Dee, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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