16 leap year facts for 2016, from fines for unwilling grooms to farmers’ bad luck

This year is a leap year, with 366 days instead of 365. But do you know many of us will work a day for free in 2016? And that leap years don’t happen every four years?

Here are 16 facts you may not know about leap year...

1

The leap year’s extra day is vital because a complete orbit around the sun takes slightly longer than 365 days – 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds longer, to be exact.

At one time people observed a 355-day calendar with an extra 22-day month every two years. But in 45BC Julius Caesar ordered his astronomer, Sosigenes, to simplify things.

Sosigenes opted for the 365-day year with an extra day every four years to use up the extra hours. The extra day is added to February because it used to be the last month of the Roman calendar.

2

The system was then fine-tuned by Pope Gregory XIII. He coined the term “leap year” and declared that a year that is divisible by 100, but not by 400, is not a leap year.

So 2000 was a leap year under the Gregorian calendar, as was 1600. But 1700, 1800 and 1900 were not.

The tradition of women proposing on leap day is thought to date back to 5th-century Ireland when St Bridget complained to St Patrick that women had to wait too long for suitors to propose.

He then gave women a single day in a leap year to pop the question – the last day of the shortest month. Legend has it that Brigid then dropped to a knee and proposed to Patrick that instant, but he refused, kissing her on the cheek and offering a silk gown to soften the blow.

Read more: Christmas miracle returns wedding ring ripped from man’s finger in Boxing Day swim

4

Others believe the tradition originates from Scotland when Queen Margaret, then aged just five, declared in 1288 that a woman could propose to any man she liked on February 29.

She ruled that men who refused the proposal would need to pay a fine in the form of a kiss, a silk dress, a pair of gloves or a fine of one pound. To give suitors fair warning – and possibly a chance to escape – a woman was required to wear breeches or a scarlet petticoats on the day of the proposal.