The mathematical term ‘geometry’ is simply the Greek for land measurement, and a skill that evolved to ensure the accurate measurement of areas of land or to settle boundary disputes, as was the case with the Mason–Dixon Line. Although most imagine this was made to mark the north-south divide of the USA, it was in fact a non-political and relatively short line established by surveyors Jeremiah Dixon and Charles Mason to settle a 1760s land dispute between the Calverts of Maryland and the Penns of Pennsylvania.
Readers will also notice that some measurements of area, regarded today as fixed units, started out as more nebulous concepts based on the area of land the average man could plough in a day and, as land quality varied from one location to another, so too did the size of the acre. As for volume, this is derived from the Latin volvere, to roll, and was first used for rolls of parchment. The term shifted to the books that replaced such scrolls and it was the large dimensions of early books that caused ‘volume’ to take on overtones of bulk and size.
THE ACRE
In medieval times the area of land a man owned and the amount of livestock it could support was the main measure of wealth, so it was essential, if only for assessing the amount of tax owed, to establish a nationally accepted system of measuring land. But unlike today, when most accepted units of area are fixed in terms of square feet, yards or miles, most medieval measurements of area related more to the amount of ploughing a man could accomplish with a team of oxen within a given time frame.
In early England it was reckoned that a fair day’s work for a man with a yoke of oxen would result in him ploughing a patch of land that was forty times as long as the sixteen-and-a-half-foot (5 m) rod he used to goad the oxen, and four times that rod’s width. This day’s work fixed the size of the acre as being a patch of ploughed land that measured 220 yd x 22 yd (201 m x 20 m) – 4,840 yd2 (4,047 m2). In times of strife, the yokels tipped their ox-goads with metal spikes to turn them into pikes and the 5.5-yd (5 m) rod is still a standard tool carried by modern surveyors. Best of all, the ploughman needed no supervision as he could tell with ease when his work was done as the answer to that question was, quite literally, in his own hands.
So, the standard acre was established by the unit of a day’s work for a man presented with good, level, arable land – but what if the land to be put under the plough was impacted and dry, waterlogged and poorly drained, or if it lay at an angle? Common sense came into play to alter the size of the acre from county to county and country to country. In Ireland, for example, the acre comprised 7,840 yd2 (6,555 m2), while in arable Cheshire it comprised 10,240 yd2 (8,561 m2). In medieval Italy, where the land was not of the best quality, the acre dropped to 1,507 yd2 (1,260 m2) and it fell to 1,196 yd2 (1,000 m2) in Greece and Turkey.
In medieval Germany, erstwhile time-and-motion men realized that both man and beast would be fresher in the morning than in the afternoon so the Tagwerk, or day’s work, was cut in two with the Morgen being the measure of work a ploughman would be expected to accomplish in the morning, that constituting about 65 per cent of his Tagwerk. But again, soil quality meant that, across Germany, the Morgen varied dramatically from the 2,279 yd2 (1,905 m2) expected in tough-to-plough Homburg (whence the famous hats) to the 6,035 yd2 (5,046 m2) demanded in the dairy lands of Holstein. In northern Germany’s über-arable Hadeln, the Morgen expanded to an eye-watering 14,000 yd2 (11,705 m2).
Throughout landowning Europe, it was traditional for the oldest son to inherit the better acreage, while his younger brothers were allocated land of progressively less value. In southern Spain, where such tradition persisted until the mid-twentieth century, the least arable land was the scrubland closest to the sea, this being the unenviable lot of many a youngest son until the tourist boom of the 1960s, when the youngest sons started to sell off their valuable land to developers.
In England, this fragmentation of farms by inheritance was countered by successive Acts of Enclosure. These put farms too small to be practicable under compulsory purchase orders so the dividing hedgerows could be dug up and collective units put under new ownership and modern management. Between 1604 and 1914 there were 5,283 such acts, resulting in the ‘traditional’ grand patchwork of the English countryside.
THE HIDE
Next up in size from the acre was the hide, an Anglo-Saxon term meaning family, as this was the extent of land expected to furnish a livelihood for the average peasant and his family. Similar to the acre of moveable size, the hide too was more an estimation of worth or richness of the land and was adjudged as being the equivalent of eight oxgangs: an oxgang being an old Danelaw concept based on the area that one ox could plough in the planting season. Again, this depended very much on the quality of the land but, on average, a hide comprised anything from sixty to one hundred and twenty acres (24–49 hectares).
After the Norman Conquest, the hide was redefined as that amount of land expected to yield the holder £1 of income a year. Today, £1 will buy something relatively meagre from your local pound shop, yet this was a significant sum in the twelfth century, when you could buy an ox for a shilling (five new pence). However, the holder of a hide would be taxed at that rate whether or not the land had yielded such income that year; no excuses. In fact, it is worth mentioning here that the man we now call a farmer was then called a house-bond – whence ‘husband’, as you could not hold a hide unless you were married – and firmer, or farmer, was the title of the tax collectors.
Tax collecting at this time was time-consuming, and if the officials did not live in the area and know who was hiding what then a shortfall could be expected. So the Crown subcontracted to men who bought the tax collection concession for a given number of hides – or indeed a whole county – for a fixed, or firm, price and then set about trying to tax a profit out of the locals (hence the idiom to ‘farm out’ work). In time, the title of these firmers, or farmers, shifted to men who rented a parcel of land in the hope of making a profit over and above the ‘firm’ rent they had paid.
Hides were gathered into divisions of a shire called a hundred as, in the eyes of the Crown and for military purposes, such an area would be expected to muster that many men under arms in times of need. With hides varying in size, depending on the quality of the land and the density of the population, a hundred also contained in practice anything from eighty to one hundred and twenty hides. Each hundred was controlled by the iron fist of a baron, put in place by the Crown to maintain the law, so this old size of his fiefdom also came to denote the size of the standard barony.
The hundreds were also gathered into larger subdivisions of a shire called a rape or a rope, from the medieval custom of law courts being held in the open but roped off from the crowd. There was also usually a hitching rail erected in front of the magistrates and anyone with something pertinent to say was ‘called to the bar’. The jurisdiction of these old ropes evolved into the typical area covered by a county court, and urban district councils were created to administer the day-to-day running of the area. There was a larger division of a shire called a thridding – one-third part – but this is now only remembered in Yorkshire in the form of Riding.
The hundreds are also largely forgotten, save the legal nicety of accepting election to the Chiltern Hundreds, an option open to any British MP wishing to quit their seat in the Commons mid-term.
Both pints and gallons started out in medieval times as measures of wet or dry goods and, to a lesser extent, both still fulfil these twin functions. The first definition of the pint was the combined volume of thirty-two mouthfuls of fluid as spat out into a container that then had a line painted on the outside as the level marker: it takes its name from the Latin pingere, meaning painted.
In fact, the unedifying measure of the spat-out mouthful lies at the root of many imperial measures of volume, both past and present. Obviously, when it came to the larger measures listed below, these were simple multiplications of the thirty-two-mouthful pint, as no one could monitor the 32,768 mouthfuls that made up the butt – imagine losing count halfway through! In later and more fastidious times the mouthful was rebranded as the tablespoonful, but in medieval days it was ruled that there were:
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2 mouthfuls to the pony |
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512 to the peck |
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4 to the jack |
1,024 to the kenning |
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8 to the gill or jill |
2,048 to the bushel |
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16 to the cup |
4,096 to the strike |
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32 to the pint |
8,192 to the coomb |
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64 to the quart |
16,384 to the hogshead |
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128 to the pottle |
32,768 to the butt |
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256 to the gallon |
JACK AND JILL AND THE MUNCHKINS
Although the jack is largely now obsolete, the gill or jill is still sometimes used to measure spirits. The still-popular nursery rhyme might be a satire on the fact that in 1625 Charles I tried to raise a little extra revenue by downsizing the jack and the jill while maintaining the same taxes, only to have his scam blocked by parliament.
Eventually tiring of definitions dictated by some peasant’s oral capacity, Elizabeth I decreed that the pint should comprise twenty fluid ounces, as indeed it still does. In America, it was decided after the War of Independence (1775–83) that it would be more sensible to fix their ‘liberty’ pint to that volume occupied by one pound of water. This is still the definition, which is why the US pint, at sixteen fluid ounces, is shorter than the imperial measure.
From the late medieval era until the early nineteenth century the Scottish equivalent of the pint was the mutchkin, which corresponded to three-quarters of an English pint. Through the notion of this being something of a short measure, the term was adopted in the altered form of munchkins by L. Frank Baum (1856–1919), a man of Scots-Irish heritage, in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900).
The Scottish also had a measure they called a pint but, confusingly, this equated to three English pints. This recognized unit remained in service in Scotland until the close of the nineteenth century. With the pronounced Scottish influence in Canada, the old Canadian pint was likewise three English pints (1.7 l) – now reduced to a quart, or two pints (about 1 l) – while the equally significant French influence gave Canada the old French chopin – half a Scottish pint – for both liquids and dry goods. Just as in England, where some types of seafood are still sold by the pint, in Canada one can still buy punnets of blueberries and other small fruits packaged by the chopin.
THE CHOPIN
The Polish composer Frédéric Chopin’s (1810-49) French father had an ancestor who had been a wine broker and their family name is taken from the chopin measure: once a standard retail unit of wine siphoned off the main barrel. The old French chopin was 0.852 of the yet-to-be-established litre (1 ½ pt) and was, in pre-revolutionary France, the standard size of a bottle of wine. After metrication, the chopin was downsized to a more convenient 0.75 of a litre (1 ⅓ pt) and it was this smaller chopin that was used in multiples to produce the outlandishly named champagne bottles of unmanageable size that run from the three-litre / four-chopin / five-pint Jeroboam up to the thirty-litre / forty-chopin / fifty-three-pint Melchizedek – just try lifting that to your lips!
In post-revolutionary France the litre was defined as being that volume of water required to fill a cube with ten-centimetre sides. This was thought to weigh a kilogram but, as proper consideration had not been given to the purity of the water and the right temperature to ensure its maximum density, the measure was slightly under par. Nor were matters much helped by the fact that the definitive kilogram weight kept in the French Academy was itself overweight by twenty-eight parts-per-million, which left this proto-litre measuring 1.000028 l / 1 ¾ pt proper.
This remained the case until 1901 when the French General Conference on Weights and Measures decided to put right this minor error by abandoning the notion of a ten-centimetre cube and opting instead for one kilogram of pure, distilled water at its maximum density of 3.98 °C and subjected to the pressure of exactly one atmosphere.
At the twelfth sitting of that same General Conference in 1964 it was decided to redefine the litre yet again by reverting to the 1790s concept of the ten-centimetre cube, so that a litre of water now weighs a fraction less than a kilogram but is close enough for rule-of-thumb calculations. Be that as it may, ‘litre’ is no longer used in scientific circles, where it has been replaced by ‘cubic decimetre’.
There is even a reason why the standard champagne coupe glass has a circumference of 30 cm (12 in.) and a capacity of 260 ml (9 fl oz). Formally known in France as a bol-sein, or breast-cup, according to some experts this style of glass was first manufactured from a mould taken from the left breast of a youthful Marie Antoinette (1755–93), who was but fourteen when she married Louis XVI (1754–93) of France in 1770. The mould was taken three years later and the glasses produced, possibly as the prank of a vengeful teenager who could have a private chuckle at the spectacle of her sworn enemy and husband’s mistress, Madame du Barr y (1743–93), drinking from one such at court.
In the seventeenth century the minimum standard for British Navy rum was an eye-watering one hundred degrees proof, or 58 per cent ABV (alcohol by volume) – but as the hydrometer was yet to be invented, alcoholic strength had to be checked another way. If there was one thing a warship had in abundance it was gunpowder and it was established that this would fail to ignite if soaked in rum that contained too much water – anything less than 57.15 per cent ABV. It is perhaps worth mentioning here that while ‘proof ‘ today stands synonymous with ‘evidence’ or ‘validation’, its original meaning was more akin to ‘test’, as in ‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating’.
This was the standard test conducted by the captain of any ship to make sure he was not being diddled by the supplier. The crew would also conduct spot checks throughout the voyage to make sure the purser was not watering down their beloved rum to make a bob or two on the side.
Although such fun-time test methods were banned in the UK in 1980 by Brussels officials who ruled that all alcohol must be stated by ABV, some imported brands of vodka and rum from Poland and the Caribbean still state the strength of the contents by the old proof-ratings: this makes sense of labels proclaiming, say, 160° proof. For the adventurous and possibly suicidal drinker, the strongest legal drink on the market is Spirytus Delikatesowy, a Polish vodka with a 192° proof rating – just short of pure alcohol.
The size of the old wooden barrels used to transport wine and beer was in the main dictated by the size of the doorways of the inns and taverns to which they would be delivered. Although in general speech ‘barrel’ is used of any wooden cask, it is in fact a specific size of one containing thirty-six UK gallons (31.5 US gal.).
In France, the standard wine barrel, called a barrique, contained 225 l / 396 pt and, like the English beer barrel, had to be of a size that rendered it manoeuvrable through the narrow streets and tavern doorways of old Paris. This resulted in the barrique standing disproportionally high so that, when filled with cobblestones dug out of those same streets, six of them abreast made a perfect ‘barricade’ to block troops advances during times of riot and unrest.
Irked by the speed at which vast swathes of the city could be rendered no-go areas to his troops by wine barrels, in 1853 Napoleon III (1808–73) commissioned Baron Haussmann to demolish most of medieval Paris and impose the now much-loved network of avenues and boulevards which, too wide to barricade, favoured the deployment of massed troops and cavalry charges. Thus did the dimensions of the humble wine barrel contribute to the beauty of Paris we see today.
In 1483, Richard III (1452–85) decreed that the butts (or casks) used for the wholesale of wine should be none other than the seventy-gallon puncheon and the thirty-five-gallon tierce, this second measure surviving to travel to the New World where it equated to forty-two of the slightly smaller US gallons.
Centuries later, in 1858, Edwin Drake (1819–80) became the first man to actually drill for oil instead of scooping it out of natural seepage pits. Ridiculed for pursuing a madcap venture, Drake, surrounded by jeering locals at Titusville, Pennsylvania, made the world’s first oil strike, collecting his black gold in old washtubs bought for the purpose.
Distressed by spillage levels during transport and reasoning that a washtub was but a barrel without a lid, Drake turned to the local whisky makers who were still using King Richard’s forty-two-US-gallon tierce. But his levels of production gradually forced down the price of oil from $10 a barrel at the time of his strike ($330 at today’s values) to $2 a barrel by 1860 and, as that was about the same as the cost of a new barrel to ship his oil, bulk rail transport evolved but shipments were still quoted in multiples of the forty-two-US-gallon barrel.
The US Military of the twentieth century preferred to store its oil in a steel fifty-five-gallon (forty-six-imperial-gallon) steel drum, made especially for them by the Iron Clad Manufacturing Company, owned by celebrated journalist Nellie Bly (1864–1922). It was abandoned examples of such containers, left lying around the island of Trinidad by the US Navy of the 1940s, that locals adapted to musical use.
It was thus no coincidence that the first properly sponsored and organized troupe was the Esso Trinidad Steel Band, which went on a world tour in 1967 to promote the eponymous oil company.
