On the Feast of Saint Monday (2024)

There is, for members of a certain generation in the United Kingdom, a particular strain of micro-nostalgia about a collection of long-cancelled TV shows. If you were to ask someone born between around 1970 and 1985, and who grew up in that country, what they associated with Bullseye, Heartbeat or the Antiques Roadshow, they’d likely respond with some variation on the word ‘dread’. On the face of it, it seems surprising that a lighthearted game show, a gentle drama set in rural 1960s Yorkshire or a programme about the valuing of cherished family heirlooms would conjure such feelings, but it’s not really about the shows themselves. It’s their scheduling.

The theme tunes of these shows were, and remain, the soundtrack to what we now sometimes call the ‘Sunday scaries’. They were broadcast on British TV in the early evening of Sunday, and their Pavlovian association is the creeping sense that the weekend is drawing to a close and that the working (or, more appropriately for the cohort under discussion here), schooling week is once more in view. The fun is over.¹

This example may be highly particularised, but it speaks to something rather universal. It’s still with us in the 21^st century (a time in which the phenomenon has begun to be addressed in the language of self-care) and it has a long history before that too. Indeed, so common was it that it has its own patron saint.

Of course Saint Monday is not an individual and has not been canonised or beatified (at least not by the Church). Critically, this saint has no fixed feast in the liturgical calendar. And unlike the other members of the sanctified company, Saint Monday’s Day comes fifty-two times a year.

Time, as we know it, comes to us from the sky. Our days and years are governed by our relationship with the sun. Our months, the moon. The passing of days and seasons regulated working life, telling us when to hunt, when to sow, when to harvest and when to rest. Oceanic work schedules relied on the tides. Cultures observed a sabbath but life otherwise ran to the rhythm of nature.

The advent of clock-time changed all this, first in monasteries then in secular workplaces. Monks conducted their lives to strict canonical hours, signalled by the ringing of bells but measured, increasingly through the Middle Ages, by mechanical means. In late 14^th century Paris, Heinrich von Wyck installed a mechanical clock of the verge and foliot type. Timekeepers of this era were inconsistent and inaccurate. Further technological developments, among them the mainspring and the pendulum, would allow for the consistent marking of time.

And of work. Consistent timekeeping allowed for the synchronisation of labour, while the division of time into regularised sections that kept the same duration irrespective of the season or latitude meant that the working day could begin and end at precisely the same time, week in, week out.

Or at least in theory. Time remained slippy for a while. Working patterns, while not governed strictly by nature, were set by the laws of supply and demand. Artisans could work only when they had materials with which to do so. In some periods, low supply meant a slower pace of work. Inclement weather could force a stop to certain outdoor endeavours. Amusingly, these slow periods would often coincide with the day following the sabbath.

A spirit of idleness on Mondays (and sometimes extending into Tuesdays) can be observed in writings from the 17^th century. Monday was informally taken as a day of absence, extending the sabbath by a day, leading one satirist to note that ‘Munday is Sundayes (sic) brother’.2 Moralisers inveighed against the tendency of workers to drink through their Sundays and spend their Mondays hungover (or still at the bottle if the spirit and funds permitted). Those who did make it into work would often work at a slower and more casual rate.

References to Saint Monday (itself a form of folk satire) began to appear around this time. Benjamin Franklin, who was something of a proto-Linkedin influencer, boasted that he had never personally observed St Monday.3 For many people, however, Saint Monday was a joyful holiday. Representatives of various trades would claim that Saint Monday was the special invention of their craft. Potters in Stoke-on-Trent had a ‘devout regard for Saint Monday..the most beneficent patron the poor Pottery children then knew’.4 Tailors were also regarded as Saint Monday’s ‘most ardent devotees’ and claimed to have been its inventors.5

Shoemakers, saddlers, weavers, printers and colliers also sought to paint themselves as the most devoted followers of Saint Monday. The spread of such claims points to its wide popular support as a working tradition, though drinking tradition might be the more accurate label. The unorthodox holiday was associated with alcohol from the very beginning. Workers, having been paid on a Saturday, enjoyed a profligate Sunday and Monday before returning to full working power on a Tuesday. It was the tradition of the spree.

Although moralisers had deprecated Saint Monday (it was a common target for the 19^th century temperance movement), its decline came about through leniency rather than suppression. Company bosses started to permit half-day working on Saturdays, followed by the full two-day weekend. In some cases this was done as an explicit bargain, with workers told that they could finish at 2pm on a Saturday on condition that they arrived sober on Monday morning, but it was a general recognition that a decent period of repose was good for everyone.

Saint Monday didn’t go quietly. There are accounts of its observance in name right into the 20^th century, generally in small pockets of working culture such as among coopers in Burton-on-Trent, who honoured it ‘with pristine purity’ as late as 1967.6 Of course, as any HR professional with an attendance spreadsheet will tell you, private observance of the tradition continues, albeit without the label ‘Saint Monday’. That variation, we might call ‘skiveritis’, but only if we were being ungenerous.

There is no need to be so. Saint Monday and its associated traditions are part of a recognisably human pattern of leisure-seeking. It’s the slow walk back from lunch, the knocking off for a pint at 4pm on a Friday. It’s the selection of an easy task to start or finish your day. Most of all, it’s a joyful response to the phenomenon of the Sunday scaries, and the dread that accompanies the quiet relaxation of Sunday evening television.