A survey of the competing theories behind the world’s most universal practical joke
Every year on the first of April, thousands get their legs pulled. Hoaxes proliferate, false errands are run, jokes are played. And yet - as a headline in the Essex Newsman put it bluntly in 1948 - no-one knows the origin of April Fools’ Day. This is not false modesty. The learned Italian folklorist Dr. Giuseppe Pitre, who dedicated a monograph to the subject at the turn of the twentieth century, catalogued no fewer than fourteen competing theories and declined to decide in favour of any of them. Two centuries before Pitre, the antiquary John Brand, in his monumental Observations on Popular Antiquities (1813), gathered every explanation he could find and reached no firm conclusion either. The origin of the custom, wrote one journalist in 1897, “offers a perfectly free field to conjecture.”
What makes this ignorance so remarkable is that April Fools’ Day is genuinely ancient, genuinely universal, and stubbornly impervious to explanation. It is observed, in one form or another, from the North Cape to Cape Matapan, from the Bay of Biscay to the Bay of Bengal. It was known in Britain by at least the early eighteenth century, in France considerably earlier, and in India - in a closely analogous form - for as long as anyone can trace. Virtually every serious student of the subject has ended up, as the Aberdeen Press and Journal observed in 1902, noting that “the speck of motley which, according to Lamb, is in us all, assumes larger dimensions at the approach of spring.” This is perhaps the most honest explanation of all.
But it has never satisfied the antiquarians, who have offered a remarkable diversity of competing explanations. What follows is a tour through the principal theories, drawn from sources ranging from Brand and Ellis’s great compendium to the popular press across a century and a half of journalism. No definitive answer will be found at the end - but the journey is instructive.
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I. The Calendar Theory: France and the Reformed New Year
The most commonly repeated explanation - and, in the view of many scholars, the most plausible - connects the custom to a change in the calendar. Before 1564, much of Christendom celebrated the New Year on the twenty-fifth of March, the Feast of the Annunciation. In France, as in England, this ancient date was the beginning of the year, and the festivities associated with it continued through an octave of eight days, culminating on the first of April. On this final day, gifts were exchanged and visits were made.
In 1564, France became the first country to adopt the Reformed Calendar under royal decree, moving New Year’s Day back to the first of January. This was not universally known, particularly in rural areas, and those who forgot the change - or refused to acknowledge it - continued to make their New Year visits and send their gifts on the first of April. The wits of the day began to mock them, sending false presents and making fictitious visits, and thus, the argument runs, the custom of the April Fool was born.
Dundee Evening Telegraph, 1 April 1931
“When, in 1564, France took the lead in adopting the Reformed Calendar, and the New Year’s Day was carried back to January 1, only pretended and mock ceremonial visits were made on April 1, with a view to making fools of those who had forgotten the change of date.”
This explanation has the merit of specificity - it ties the custom to a documented historical event - and it neatly accounts for why France has such a strong April Fools’ tradition. It also explains the name the French give to the April Fool: poisson d’Avril, or “April Fish.” Young fish, newly hatched in spring, are easily caught; and those who were slow to adopt the new calendar were equally easy to deceive. The custom of giving children chocolate fish in France on this day is a direct descendant of this tradition.
England adopted the Gregorian calendar considerably later than France - not until 1752 - and yet the English April Fools’ tradition is clearly established well before that date. The Spectator of the early eighteenth century already treats it as an ancient and universal custom. This chronological difficulty is the main objection to the calendar theory as a complete explanation: the custom in England precedes the English calendar reform by at least half a century.
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II. The Octave Theory: Dr. Pegge and the New Year’s Festivities
A variant of the calendar theory, somewhat more satisfying in its handling of the English evidence, was proposed in 1766 by Dr. Samuel Pegge, rector of Whittington in Derbyshire, writing in the Gentleman’s Magazine under the signature “T. Row.” Pegge’s argument does not depend on the French calendar reform at all; instead, it roots the custom in the ancient English observance of the New Year on the twenty-fifth of March.
Pegge pointed out that great festivals were traditionally “attended with an Octave” - that is, they continued for eight days, of which the first and last were the principal celebrations. The first of April is precisely the octave of the twenty-fifth of March: the eighth and final day of the New Year festivities. This day would naturally have been the culmination of the season’s mirth and merriment, when the festivities reached their most riotous pitch before closing. Over time, as the religious significance of Lady Day faded and the date of the New Year shifted, what remained was simply the tradition of extraordinary licence and foolery on the first of April.
“Our year formerly began, as to some purposes, and in some respects, on the 25th of March, which was supposed to be the Incarnation of our Lord; and it is certain that the commencement of the new year, at whatever time that was supposed to be, was always esteemed an high festival... The first of April is the octave of the 25th of March, and the close or ending, consequently, of that feast.”
- Dr. Samuel Pegge, Gentleman’s Magazine, April 1766
This theory was considered by many subsequent commentators to be the most satisfactory available, and Brand in his Popular Antiquities gives it considerable attention. Dr. Brewer, in his Phrase and Fable, calls it “the most satisfactory solution.” It has the advantage of explaining the English custom independently of any continental influence, and of grounding it in well-documented practice regarding feast days and their octaves.
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III. The Indian Connection: The Huli Festival and the Vernal Equinox
For those unconvinced by the calendar theories, the most powerful evidence comes not from European history but from the Indian subcontinent. The Huli (or Holi) festival, observed by Hindus at the end of March, involves precisely the same central joke as April Fools’ Day: the sending of people on imaginary errands to non-existent destinations, for the amusement of the sender.
The last day of the Huli festival falls on the thirty-first of March - one day before April Fools’ Day in England. The coincidence is striking enough to have impressed nearly every writer who has considered the question. Colonel Pearce, in the Asiatic Researches, was one of the first Western scholars to document the parallel in detail. His account was quoted extensively by Thomas Maurice in his Indian Antiquities (1800), and through Maurice it entered the mainstream of British antiquarian discussion.
Brand & Ellis, Observations on Popular Antiquities, 1813
Maurice argues that the custom on both continents traces to “the ancient practice of celebrating with festival rites the period of the Vernal Equinox, or the day when the new year of Persia anciently began.” The Huli was, he contended, a direct survival of this primordial spring festival, and the English April Fools’ Day a parallel survival of the same tradition.
The Vernal Equinox argument has the virtue of antiquity: it pushes the origin of the custom far beyond any medieval calendar reform, back to the prehistoric celebration of the moment when winter ends and the new year begins. The sun’s entry into Aries, the first sign of the zodiac, was regarded across the ancient world as the true commencement of the year; and a festival at this liminal moment, characterised by licence and inversion, is entirely consistent with what we know of ancient spring celebrations everywhere.
The St. James’s Gazette of 1895 put the case for the Indian connection bluntly: “The Hindoos, it appears, have an annual religious festival called Huli, which ends on the last day of March, and is celebrated on that day by exactly the same game of sending people on imaginary and bootless errands for the purpose of enjoying their discomfiture. This corresponds with surprising accuracy to the European custom, and furnishes a pedigree of sufficient antiquity to satisfy the most exacting mind.”
The Stalybridge Reporter of 1877 added another dimension, quoting Maurice: “The first of April was anciently observed in Britain as a high and general festival, in which an unbounded hilarity reigned through every order of its inhabitants; for the sun at that period of the year entering into the sign Aries, the new year, and with it the season of rural sports and vernal delight, was then supposed to have commenced.”
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IV. The Christian Theory: Passion, Pilate, and the Mock Trials
A distinctly more pious explanation connects April Fools’ Day to the Passion of Christ. The argument was made most systematically by Fleury de Bellingen in his Etymology of French Proverbs (1656), and it turns on the French term poisson d’Avril. Bellingen contended that “poisson” was a popular corruption of “passion” - that is, the Passion of the Saviour. The custom of sending people on pointless errands commemorated, in a debased form, the sending of Christ back and forth between Annas, Caiaphas, Pilate, and Herod during the trial that preceded the Crucifixion.
Brand quotes Bellingen’s argument at length, noting that “as the Jews sent Christ backwards and forwards to mock and torment him... this ridiculous or rather impious custom took its rise from thence, by which we send about from one place to another such persons as we think proper objects of our ridicule.” The Crucifixion, of course, took place in the spring - around the time of the Passover - which would account for the date.
Support for this theory was drawn from the fact that during the Middle Ages, the mock trial of Christ before Pilate and Herod was regularly enacted as part of the Easter miracle plays. As the War Cry noted in 1939, “the more probable reason goes back to the days of the Miracle-play, which was always given at Easter and showed scenes from the Passion of our Lord.” In Germany, the phrase “sending someone from Pilate to Herod” remains to this day an expression meaning to send someone on a needless and fruitless journey.
However, most modern commentators - and many Victorian ones - have found this explanation unsatisfying. The Daily News of 1926 called it a “farcical commemoration.” The primary difficulty is chronological: if the custom originated in this way, one would expect to find references to it in early Christian literature or medieval sources, and no such references have been found. As the St. James’s Gazette dryly observed, it is “a fantastic theory, unsupported by any evidence except the analogy of Punch and Judy.”
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V. The Jewish and Biblical Theory: Noah’s Dove
A third religious explanation, less theologically charged than the Passion theory, was published in the Public Advertiser in 1789 under the heading “Humorous Jewish Origin of the Custom of making Fools on the First of April.” The argument runs as follows: it was on the first day of the Hebrew month corresponding to our April that Noah sent the dove from the Ark before the waters had sufficiently abated. The dove returned without finding land, having been sent on a “sleeveless errand.” To perpetuate the memory of this deliverance, it became customary to punish those who forgot the anniversary by sending them on similarly futile missions.
Ormskirk Advertiser, 28 March 1878
“It is more probable that the custom had an earlier origin still, as the natives of India indulge in a very similar pastime on the preceding day. So that if it has a religious origin at all, it is not impossible that it may have sprung from some forgotten ceremony practised by the great Aryan family, before it broke away from its primeval seat.”
The Noah theory has a pleasingly picturesque quality and was widely circulated in the popular press throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, most serious scholars treated it as a charming fiction. The same 1878 Ormskirk Advertiser piece that described it suggested that the Indian parallel made a Vedic or Aryan origin more probable than a specifically Hebrew one.
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VI. Roman and Celtic Theories
The British Apollo of 1708 - one of the earliest printed discussions of the custom’s origin - proposed a Roman explanation: the festival was a distant echo of the Rape of the Sabine Women, in which Romulus deceived the neighbouring Sabine families by inviting them to games in honour of Neptune in the opening days of April, only to seize their daughters when they arrived. This was cited, with varying degrees of seriousness, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the Manchester Evening News of 1904 quoted the passage at length, while adding that “whether or not this is the true origin of All-Fool’s Day I cannot say. Considering the significancy, I would, personally, prefer that it should not be.”
Brand’s Popular Antiquities devotes considerable space to the Roman Quirinalia - the “Feast of Fools” held in February in honour of Romulus - and to the Roman Festum Fatuorum or Feast of Fools, a wild carnival that the early Church attempted to suppress but failed to extinguish entirely. Brand suggested that “All Fools” might be a corruption of the Northern English “Auld Fools,” linking it to an ancient calendar entry for a “Feast of Old Fools” found in old Romish calendars.
Others proposed a Celtic origin. The Waterford News of 1897 noted archly that attributing the custom to an ancient Celtic festival “is tantamount to throwing up the antiquarian sponge altogether. Anything may be an ancient Celtic custom - why not? Nobody can prove it or disprove it.” The Roman festival of Hilaria, held from the twenty-fifth of March to the fourth of April in honour of Cybele, has also been proposed, while the Rugby Observer of 1929 added the intriguing etymology that “from the Latin Aphrilis comes the name of her month, April.”
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VII. Names Around the World: Gowks, Fish, and Noddies
Whatever its origin, April Fools’ Day has acquired a remarkable variety of local names and customs. In Scotland, the April Fool is a gowk - the Scots word for cuckoo, a bird universally regarded as an emblem of stupidity and worthlessness. The traditional Scottish prank was to send a victim on “Hunt the Gowk” - dispatching them with a sealed letter that read, when opened by the next recipient, “On the first day of April, Hunt the Gowk another mile.” The bearer would be sent onward from house to house until patience or distance defeated the joke.
In some northern English counties, the victim was called an “April Noddy” rather than an April Fool; in parts of Scotland, the day was divided, with the morning devoted to April Fool pranks and the afternoon to “Tailing Day” - tricks involving the back and posterior, of which the “Kick Me” sign pinned to the back is the surviving remnant. Brand’s notes record that Orkney and Fife kept this distinction as late as the nineteenth century.
France’s poisson d’Avril tradition has its own elaborations. The theory that April fish are young and easily caught - making them a natural emblem of the credulous - is one explanation for the term. The Ellon Times of 1994 described the French tradition that began when “on this day some young fish began to appear in streams. The fish were foolish enough to be caught easily - thus April 1 became a time for catching out the foolish.” Germany, Spain, Sweden, Russia, Mexico, and countries across Asia all have analogous customs. The Globe of 1876 observed that “April Fools are made in every quarter of the globe - from the North Cape to Cape Matapan, from the Bay of Biscay to the Bay of Bengal.”
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VIII. Great Hoaxes: The Tower of London and Other Impostures
If the origin of April Fools’ Day remains obscure, its history is rich with documented examples of memorable hoaxes. One of the most celebrated was the Tower of London White Lions hoax, which appears to have been perpetrated more than once. In 1860, a formally printed card - bearing what appeared to be an official seal, produced by pressing an inverted sixpence blackened with lead onto the paper - was dispatched to thousands of Londoners inviting them to “view the Annual Ceremony of Washing the White Lions” on the first of April. There were, of course, no white lions, and no West Gate where admittance was to be gained. Tower Hill was nevertheless alive with cabs and curious visitors for much of the morning.
Jonathan Swift, in his Journal to Stella, records a scheme devised with Arbuthnot and Lady Masham in 1713 to spread the news that a criminal recently hanged had somehow come back to life and was to be seen at a local tavern. Messengers were sent to all their friends. Nobody was taken in, and the story fell flat - a reminder that even great wits can produce remarkably feeble jokes.
The People’s Friend of 1882 recounted two French stories that have become classics of the genre. In the first, a woman caught stealing a watch from a friend tried, when the watch was found hidden in her rooms, to claim that she had merely been making an April Fool of the policeman. The magistrate sentenced her to imprisonment until the following first of April, to be discharged as an April Fool. In the second, Francis, Duke of Lorraine, and his wife escaped from imprisonment in Nantes on the first of April, disguised as peasants. A woman recognised them and ran to alert the guard - but the sentinel, hearing that a duke and duchess were passing through the gate in disguise on April the first, waved them through with a laugh. “April fool!” he replied, with his finger to his nose.
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IX. The Broadcast Era: Spaghetti Trees and Gravity Anomalies
The twentieth century brought April Fools’ Day to a mass audience through broadcasting, and the tradition of institutional hoaxing reached new heights. The BBC’s 1957 Panorama programme depicting the Swiss spaghetti harvest - in which a documentary crew filmed families harvesting spaghetti from trees - fooled a substantial number of viewers and prompted calls to the BBC asking how one might grow a spaghetti tree at home.
In 1976, the astronomer Patrick Moore announced on Radio 2 that at 9.47 that morning, the conjunction of Jupiter and Pluto would create an upward gravitational pull sufficient to make listeners momentarily lighter, and invited them to jump at the appointed moment. Hundreds rang in to report that they had experienced the floating sensation. One man claimed he had bumped his head on the ceiling and demanded compensation.
The Derby Express of 1993 noted that the BBC had also once told listeners that new EEC regulations required the wearing of non-slip shoes in wet weather - and been inundated with concerned calls. Radio Wyvern announced that a man had become stuck in a glider above the Malvern Hills in an air current, and invited listeners to bring their vacuum cleaners to blow him down.
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X. The Immutable Law of Noon
Whatever its origin, April Fools’ Day has always been governed by one firm rule: the joke must be played before noon. After twelve o’clock, the would-be trickster becomes the fool. This principle is recorded in Brand’s Popular Antiquities, which quotes the traditional London street rhyme:
“Fool’s time’s gone past,
You’re the biggest fool at last.
When Fool’s-day comes again,
You’ll be the biggest fool then.”
- Traditional, quoted in the Globe, 1 April 1876
The same rule appears in the People’s Friend of 1882: “From time immemorial it has been our immutable law that April Fools must be made before twelve o’clock in the day. After noon the joke is supposed to recoil on its own perpetrator.” The precise basis for this noon deadline has never been satisfactorily explained, but it has proved more durable than almost any of the theories about the custom’s origin.
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XI. The Most Honest Answer
The Eastbourne Gazette of 1959, looking back seventy-five years to a column in its own pages, quoted a Victorian predecessor who had written: “Why the First of April should be set apart for joke-making is one of the things I have never been able to understand. Everybody willingly acknowledges that the practice is very stupid, and extremely ridiculous, yet nevertheless it continues to prevail.” The same column concluded with a characteristically Victorian pragmatism: “It pleases the innocent, does us no harm, and youth must have its follies.”
This is perhaps the most honest position. April Fools’ Day is one of those customs whose persistence is its own justification. The theorists have been at it for at least three centuries - the French calendar reform, the octave of Lady Day, the Holi festival, Noah’s dove, the Passion of Christ, the Sabine women, the Celtic druids, the Roman Saturnalia - and none has carried the day. Poor Robin’s Almanac of 1760, quoted by Brand, put the matter with appropriate irony:
“The first of April, some do say,
Is set apart for All-Fools’ Day;
But why the people call it so,
Nor I, nor they themselves, do know.”
- Poor Robin’s Almanac, 1760, quoted in Brand & Ellis, Observations on Popular Antiquities, 1813
What is clear is this: something deep in the human temperament responds to the arrival of spring with an irresistible impulse toward mischief. The ice breaks, the sap rises, the sun crosses the equator, and we find ourselves compelled to stick a “Kick Me” sign on our neighbour’s back and deny all knowledge. Whether this impulse was first formalised in ancient Persia, in medieval France, in Hebrew scripture, or nowhere in particular, it has proved one of the most tenacious customs in the human repertoire.
It has, after all, been fooling people for centuries. And it shows no sign of stopping.
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Principal Sources
John Brand & Sir Henry Ellis, Observations on Popular Antiquities (1813); Jersey Times & British Press (3 April 1905); Sunderland Daily Echo (2 April 1938); Manchester Evening News (2 April 1904); Isle of Man Daily Times (4 April 1960); Essex Newsman (2 April 1948); Daily News, London (31 March 1926); Morning Leader (1 April 1905); South London Observer (31 March 1906); Derby Express (25 March 1993); Cumberland & Westmorland Herald (6 April 1901); Eastbourne Gazette (1 April 1959); Western Daily Press (1 April 1940); Atherstone News and Herald (10 April 1970); Aberdeen Press and Journal (16 April 1902); Saffron Walden Weekly News (30 March 1989); Ellon Times & East Gordon Advertiser (31 March 1994); Forfar Herald (5 April 1901 & 6 April 1928); Dundee Evening Telegraph (1 April 1931); War Cry (1 April 1939); Ireland's Saturday Night (29 March 1930); Waterford News (27 March 1897); Echo, London (31 March 1904); Rugby Observer (29 March 1929); St. James's Gazette (1 April 1895); Elgin Courant (8 April 1902); Preston Chronicle (2 April 1864); Globe (1 April 1876); Stalybridge Reporter (7 April 1877); Ormskirk Advertiser (28 March 1878); People's Friend (29 March 1882); Public Opinion (2 April 1886); Newcastle Chronicle (30 March 1889 & 24 December 1892); Northern Scot (11 April 1891); Bingley Chronicle (1 April 1892).