![]() To get an idea of just how frequent, the Church of England currently celebrates nine Principal Feasts, three Principal Holy Days, and 26 Festivals – that’s not counting Festivals and Lesser Festivals besides. They could mean time off work and they certainly meant an excuse for a party.Īnd holy days were very frequent. The word ‘holiday’ is derived from ‘holy day’, or a saint’s day in the Christian calendar, and holy days were an important part of medieval life. While living in the Middle Ages didn’t have a lot to recommend it, there were more holidays that you might expect – and you’d get to enjoy more of them than you realise, as people who survived childhood (a tough ask) could expect to live to see their 60s or 70s. Traditional feast days such as Easter remain compulsory holiday in many workplaces. That’s unless you belonged to the nobility, in which case there was less drudgery in the mud, but more back-stabbing, and the possibility of dying a little further away from home in the Crusades. In the popular imagination, it was about endless drudgery in unproductive mud, praying a lot, and everyone dying at the age of 30, interspersed with war and plague for a diversion. You probably don’t think of the Middle Ages as being much of a time for holidays. The Middle Ages: Holy-days and pilgrimages So where did summer holidays come from, and how did our current idea of what school pupils should spend the months of July and August doing evolve? In this article, we take a look at five key points in the history of the great English summer holiday. Perhaps it was just to be nice to school students by giving them time off at the sunniest part of the year. So whatever the origin of six weeks off at the height of summer is, it’s not for the sake of farmers. Besides which, a brief glance at the farming calendar tells you that a holiday that ends at the start of September is not going to be much use for bringing in the harvest in the early autumn. ![]() But the current school system was developed over the course of the 19th century, when English farms were increasingly mechanised and having children helping with the harvest would only have been necessary for a small percentage of the population. One popular idea is that school children have a long summer holiday (six weeks for most pupils in the UK) so that they could help work in the fields over the summer. The Top 10 Most Important Events in British History.In this situation, the loss of the high pressure will give way to cooler winds from the north-west, bringing rain from the Atlantic with them. Sadly, that doesn't mean we're in for a particularly mild winter. "At the moment, the high pressure is slinking away to the west and allowing a north-westerly wind to come in and take over," says Hardy. If the high pressure remains where it is, we could be in for a cold winter, but there are already signs it is moving on. Since mid-July a high pressure system has dominated Britain's weather, leading to few days of cloud and rain. ![]() ![]() The result is a colder winter, so long as the high-pressure weather system doesn't move on. "Without the cloud, you lose the blanket that keeps the ground warm at night," says Hardy. With no cloud cover, the heat radiated from the ground over the longer nights escapes, making the land cool more than usual. If the high-pressure system persists into the autumn and early winter, the clear skies also continue as the days get shorter, giving long, cloudless nights as winter approaches. High pressure systems force air downwards and, since rain clouds typically need rising air to form, the skies above high pressure systems usually remain cloud free. A long, hot summer means a high-pressure weather system has been lurking overhead or nearby. ![]()
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