Off With Their Heads :) or The Headless Horseman Wannabe

[or.phan_ann]

No: HPFGUIDX 167913

> > Goddlefrood:
> > due to the
> > anomaly of the change over in the British Isles (barring one
> > small community in Wales that retains the Julian Calendar to this
> > day, and who would like a bet that JK does not also know this ;))
>
> Random832:
> I'd like to hear more about this.

Ann:

It's real, although I hadn't heard of it before now:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/585898.stm is about it
celebrating the Millennium twice. You do have to wonder how they
manage to keep to the old calendar, though. Can they take "their"
bank holidays off if they work for a business running on "our" time?
What about the Inland Revenue? And postmarks? Do they receive letters
before they've been sent? It must be magic.

> Random832:
> Ah, but, you see, it's not actually in evidence that wizards did
> live openly among muggles. We certainly had copyright law in most
> countries before the Berne Convention was ever passed, and while
> the Geneva Convention currently in effect is from 1949 (as amended
> 1977, 2005), the first passed in 1864. Just because the
> international statute of secrecy per se passed in 1692 does not
> mean wizards were not largely separated from muggle society long
> before that.

Ann:

This is my opinion, too. 1692 is very late for British wizards to
still be living openly as wizards; for one thing, it's after the
Civil Wars, and Muggle history seems to be very similar to ours. I
think the last important wizard to live openly in our history was Dr
Dee, and things were definitely different by the end of the century.
In my opinion the establishment of Hogwarts and the enrollment quill
represent the first unification of British and Irish wizards (who are
probably the same nation in the Wizarding World), and wizarding
culture developed from there, drawing in young wizards as they were
admitted to Hogwarts and snowballing; not that secrecy necessarily
developed deliberately, or even perceptibly to most people. The
combination of the Wars of the Roses and reports of early Mediaeval
witch-hunts might have forced a formal Statute of Secrecy later
overridden by the International S of S, but I think secrecy was
already part of the culture by then. (Speaking of which, weren't the
witch-trials in Salem held in 1692? Maybe they were the immediate
cause of the I S of S.)