April, June, and November.
This is the last week of September, and the last week of September is the perfect time to make sure your young scholars know the famous calendrical verse that helps us remember how many days there are in each month.
I learned this version:
Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November;
All the rest have thirty-one,
(Except February which has twenty-eight.)
I was an imperfect student.
The complete text that I apparently never quite got down is very old, and if you teach it to your students this week you’ll be welcoming them into an ancient inheritance. Here’s a version that was copied down about the year 1555:
Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November;
All the rest have thirty-one,
Excepting February alone,
And that has twenty-eight days clear
And twenty-nine in each leap year.
But even that isn’t the oldest English version. A manuscript dated to about the year 1425 contains this wording, which gives November rather than September pride of place in the first line:
Thirti dayes hath Novembir,
April, June, and Septembir;
Of xxviii is but oon,
And all the remenaunt xxx and i.
Or in modern orthography:
Thirty days hath November,
April, June, and September;
Of twenty-eight [there] is but one,
And all the remnant, thirty and one.
Versions exist in many other languages as well. Wherever the ancient Roman calendar has gone, this ancient verse, in one form or another, has trailed along behind.
What grand old calendrical traditions you be marking in your homeschool this Cygnus Term? 😊
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