WEIGHTS AND MEASURES
Anybody who has ever done any practical housekeeping in a provincial
town is familiar with certain anomalies in the buying and selling of
farm produce and other articles in common use. Why, for instance, is a
potato when young sold by weight, and when it is old by measure? Why are
gooseberries sold by measure and other small fruits by weight? Why are
eggs in Oxford sold at so many to the shilling, and in Sidmouth for so
much the dozen? Still, we can jog along with our preconceived notions as
to the proper means of apportioning out the goods we want to buy, and we
do not have to readjust or add to the Tables we learned at school. A
catalogue of the weights and measures in the dialects does however upset
a great many of our everyday ideas, and make our knowledge of Tables
seem surprisingly limited. For here we find familiar measures changing
their standard value according to locality, or according to the
commodity to be sold by measure or weight; all sorts of new measures
with queer names enter into computations where we had hitherto only
dealt with plain bushels, or pounds, or inches; liquid measures usurp
the place of dry, and vice versa; and indefinite terms like heap, bunch,
bundle become fixed quantities. Let us hope that compilers of arithmetic
books will never be allowed to stray into this field. What a fiendish
joy it would give to those tormentors of youth if they might add to
their nightmare sums about taps running into leaky baths, and men
ploughing fields by the week, and horses costing odd shillings and
pence, a few questions like this: If one man could plough an acre of
land in Westmorland in five days, working every other day, how long
would six men take to plough a field of 11½ acres in Cheshire? If a
Cornishman bought a mease of herrings in the Isle of Man and sold them
to his next-door neighbour at home, how many more herrings would he have
left for his wife to fry than if he took them to Clovelly to sell? If a
dish and a half of butter costs two shillings and twopence halfpenny,
how much butter would you get for four shillings and elevenpence three
farthings? Or nice problems on the Tables such as: If three men and a
boy could get thirty-six pankets of coal in four days and a half, how
long would it take two boys to get out a chalder? If A. bought a wash of
oysters and sold them to B. at so much per strike, what would be the
price of a prickle of whelks?
[Sidenote: _Variation in Weights and Measures_]
A gill in most of the north-country dialects means half a pint, in
Devonshire it means a quart, and in Cornwall, as a measure of tin, it
means a pint. A stone may be equivalent to any weight from 8 lb. to 24
lb., it would depend whether the article in the scales was beef, or
butter, or hay, or wool, and so on. A pound of butter used to weigh 18
oz. throughout Cheshire. In the Lake District butter was formerly sold
by the _long pound_, which was equivalent to 22 oz. A Northumbrian peck
is one third of a Winchester bushel, but a Craven peck is half a
Winchester bushel. A hundred may mean the _long hundred_, which is
usually six score, but in parts of Worcestershire, by machine weight it
is 112 lb., by count, 126. In Norfolk a hundred crabs is 240, because
crabs are counted by _casts_, and a _cast_ is a pair of crabs. According
to Brighton measure, 128 herrings make a hundred, but if it was mackerel
there would be 132. An old Cumberland rhyme gives: Five scwore to
t’hundred o’ men, money, an’ pins; Six scwore to t’hundred o’ other
things. A yard of land in Devonshire is 9 ft., but a Cornish land yard
is 6 yds. or 18 ft.
[Sidenote: _Local Terms and Customs relating to Weights and Measures_]
A _boll_ is a dry measure of capacity varying from two to six bushels.
At Alnwick, a boll of barley or oats was six bushels; of wheat two
bushels. At Hexham, a boll of barley or of oats was five bushels; of
wheat four bushels. A _trug_ (Hrf.) is a measure of wheat of which three
go to make up two bushels. A _fother_ is a cartload, in some places a
one-horse load, and in others a two-horse load. If it denotes a weight
of lead, it is equivalent to 21 cwt. and upwards. In Durham, as a
measure for coals, it meant 17⅔ cwt., cp. ‘With him ther was a
Ploughman, was his brother, That hadde i-lad of dong ful many a fother,’
Chaucer, _Prol._ ll. 529, 530. A _last_ is a dry measure, used for corn,
&c. A Lincolnshire last of oats = 21 sacks of four bushels each, but
used for rape-seed, turnip-seed, or oats the last = 10 quarters, or
eighty bushels. As a measure for herrings in East Anglia, a last of
herrings is said to be ten thousand, but if six score and twelve go to
each hundred, there would actually be 13,200. A _lug_ (War. w.Cy.) is a
measure of land, usually a rod, pole, or perch, but occasionally varying
in length, cp. ‘Eight lugs of grownd,’ Spenser, _F. Q._ Bk. II. x. 11. A
_shaftment_ is the measure of the fist with the thumb extended,
generally taken as six inches. A _bodge_ (Ken.) is an odd measure of
corn left over when the bulk has been measured out into quarters and
sacks, cp. ‘To the last bodge of oats and bottle of hay,’ Jonson, _New
Inn_.
In East Anglia a pint of butter would mean 20 oz. In parts of Kent
fruit, vegetables, and fish are sold by the quart. Bread also is sold in
pecks, gallons, and quarts. A peck in west Somerset may be used as a
measure for cider, one peck being equal to two gallons. In Cheshire and
Staffordshire pottery is sold by the _piece_. I have myself bought
flower-pots by this standard, the number of the pots contained in the
piece varying according to their size. Firewood stacked for sale is in
many districts sold by the _cord_, a measure varying in amount in
different parts of the country. In Worcestershire and Herefordshire, and
parts also of Shropshire and Gloucestershire, fruit and vegetables are
always sold by the _pot_, or _half-pot_; a kind of basket or hamper
without a lid. Hops are sold by the _pocket_, this latter being an
enormous bag some 7½ ft. long, holding about 168 lb. of hops. Bottom
might still express ‘a great desire to a bottle of hay’, and be
understood in any county. The common proverbial saying: To look for a
needle in a bottle of hay is known as far back as 1655. Peck is used
figuratively in the phrase: a peck o’ troubles. A very common way of
telling a Yorkshireman that he is judging or treating others by his own
standard of thought or action is to say he is: measuring a peck out of
his own stroke.
Any kind of indefinite measure of anything may of course be taken by
_scowl of brow_, or by _the skeg of the eye_, and things of minor weight
may be judged by the _heft_ or the _lift_.