I found myself, as always on a Friday, at Discoteca Los Ángeles. Only a hardcore remained by 5am. That included José-María, bibulous olive-oil mill owner, maker of moonshine, aged and unsuccessful lecher and sufferer of wine-blossomed facial features.
He asked what unit was used to gauge weight in Britain.
“Stones”, I said.
Something about saying the word in Castillian made me hesitate momentarily (the word is piedra – and ‘rock’ is the meaning of Peter, Pedro, etc).
He asked how height was measured.
I told him it was measured in feet. Again, I gave my answer after hesitating for a brief moment.
‘What about shoe sizes?’
‘They’re just numbers’, I said, ‘though there is some duplication, so a child’s size 10 is different from a man’s size 10, for example.’
Next morning – or perhaps it was midday, I located the conversation in the top right-hand corner of my brain.
Stones? Big rocks often located on a riverbed? The Brits weigh their mass using large pebbles as a guide?
Feet? Found at the leg’s extremities? Do Britons use the average length of a foot to measure their height? Whose foot was used as the original?
I looked up the UK’s imperial measurement index.
Feet. They’re measured in barleycorns. Barleycorns are made up of four poppy seeds, which is the smallest Anglo-Saxon unit of length. No really.
Obviously, I had to delve deeper into this archaic system of which I had been previously unaware. I thought about horses being measured in hands. I discovered that an inch was the equivalent of three barleycorns. There were and are measurements in digits, fingers, nails, palms, spans (the width of the outstretched hand, from the tip of the thumb to the tip of the little finger), cubits (the width from the tip of the fingers to the elbow), fathoms (the distance from fingertips to fingertips with arms outstretched), furlongs (the distance a plough team could be employed before resting), acres (an area that could be ploughed in one day), mouthfuls (half a fluid oz) and so many more.
I particularly like the fact that in Northern England, a jack (2.5 fl. oz.) is double the stated measurement for milk and beer than it is elsewhere in Britain.
Double jacks all round my friends, double jacks all round.
I have two books out that look closely but obliquely at this bizarre system aka Imperial. Grainger Street is about growing up in working-class England in the 1960s and 1970s and as well as studying imperial and metric side-by-side (which was a nightmare for us kids because our everyday world was the former and our future world would be the latter). The book also looks at the British currency, which changed radically in 1971.
The other book is No. 1, which has been edited by Foolproof supremo, Sylvia. Not only does the reader get to understand the weights and currencies of early 19th-century Britain, they see the old currency in action.
Oh! I’ve just seen this lovely message. Thank you, Tony.