First,

The origin of April fool’s day can be traced back as far as the period when Pope Gregory XIII established the Gregorian Calendar.

The Julian calendar which was used before his time has New Year Celebrated on April 1st, this was due to the irregularities later found in the Julian Calendar which is 11 minutes longer than the normal Lunar year.

This extra 11 minutes accounts for the lost of 11 days in the September 1752 Calendar. Read about this here https://brainerves.com/the-11-lost-days-of-september-1752/

Gregory had to correct this anomalies by creating a new calendar which represents the complete circle of the Lunar year which has 365 days, 5 hours and 49 minutes; The Gregorian Calendar.

The Gregorian Calendar has January 1st as the New Year, while The Julian Calendar has April 1st as New year’s day.

The Countries under the rule of the Pope (Catholic Church) adopted the new Gregorian Calendar, while the protestant Nations didn’t especially Britain and it’s colonies, then America. They continued to celebrate New Year on April 1st. This made many who believed in the accuracy of the new Gregorian Calendar to term anyone who believed April 1st was new year as fools…

They did this by sending people on “fool’s errands” or trying to trick people into believing something false. Eventually, the practice spread throughout Europe.


Second,

The second account on the origin of April Fools’ Day was provided by Joseph Boskin, a professor of history at Boston University.

He explained that the practice began during the reign of Constantine, when a group of court jesters and fools told the Roman emperor that they could do a better job of running the empire. Constantine, amused, allowed a jester named Kugel to be king for one day. Kugel passed an edict calling for absurdity on that day, and the custom became an annual event.

“In a way,” explained Prof. Boskin, “it was a very serious day. In those times fools were really wise men. It was the role of jesters to put things in perspective with humor.”

This explanation was brought to the public’s attention in an Associated Press article printed by many newspapers in 1983.
There was only one catch: Boskin made the whole thing up. It took a couple of weeks for the AP to realize that they’d been victims of an April Fools’ joke themselves from Boskin.

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