In an English manuscript of the twelfth century mentioned in Chambers’s “Book of Days,” and known as the “Exeter Calendar,” New Year’s is set down as a Dies mala. As an illustration of the credulity prevalent in England in the fifteenth century regarding the influences, meteorological and moral, of the occurrence of important church festivals on particular days of the week, a few lines from a manuscript of the Harleian Collection in the British Museum are here quoted:—
Lordlings all of you I warn,
If the day that Christ was born
Fell upon a Sunday,
The winter shall be good, I say,
But great winds aloft shall be;
The summer shall be fair and dry,
By kind skill and without loss.
Through all lands there shall be peace.
Good time for all things to be done,