Royal Maundy pence to each of fifty poor men. It is not known, however, whether it was as yet the practice each year to have the number of pence and the number of recipients track the monarch's age: Henry IV was the first monarch to decree that the number of pence given be determined by the monarch's age. The ceremony was not always performed on Maundy Thursday; it could be postponed a day to Good Friday by royal command, as it was in 1510. Nobles could hold their own Maundy distributions, as did Henry Percy, 5th Earl of Northumberland in the early
Julian calendar calendar, while Christian Europe adopted the Julian calendar, in either the Catholic or Orthodox variant. Starting in the 16th century, European settlements in the Americas and elsewhere likewise inherited the Julian calendar of the mother country, until they adopted the Gregorian reform. The last country to adopt the Julian calendar was the Ottoman Empire, which used it for financial purposes for some time under the name Rumi calendar and dropped the "escape years" which tied it to Muslim chronology in 1840. Although the new calendar was much simpler than the pre-Julian calendar, the pontifices initially added a leap day every