text: Secular significance In England, Lady Day was New Year's Day (i.e., the new year began on 25 March) from 1155 until 1752, when the Gregorian calendar was adopted in Great Britain and its Empire and with it the first of January as the official start of the year in England, Wales and Ireland. (Scotland changed its new year's day to 1 January in 1600, but retained the Julian calendar until 1752.) A vestige of this remains in the United Kingdom's tax year, which ends on 5 April, or "Old Lady Day", (i.e., Lady Day adjusted for the eleven "lost days" of the calendar change in 1752). Until this change Lady Day had been used as the start of the legal year but also the end of the fiscal and tax year. This should be distinguished from the liturgical and historical year.
  As a year-end and quarter-day that conveniently did not fall within or between the seasons for ploughing and harvesting, Lady Day was a traditional day on which year-long contracts between landowners and tenant farmers would begin and end in England and nearby lands (although there were regional variations). Farmers' time of "entry" into new farms and onto new fields was often this day. As a result, farming families who were changing farms would travel from the old farm to the new one on Lady Day. In 1752, the British empire finally followed most of western Europe in switching to the Gregorian calendar from the Julian calendar. The Julian lagged 11 days behind the Gregorian, and hence 25 March in the Old Style calendar became 5 April ("Old Lady Day"), which assumed the role of contractual year-beginning. (The date is significant in some of the works of Thomas Hardy, such as Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd, and is discussed in his 1884 essay "The Dorset Farm Labourer").