Measuring America. Andro Linklater

had its own, variable measures, found it almost impossible to extend their business beyond the nearest towns. ‘I never can tell what I am buying nor how I am selling,’ a Madras grain trader complained in 1864. ‘My agents inform me that rice is at so much the seer [approximately two pounds] [in one village], while in another it is double that price. I take advantage of the opportunity, invest largely, and expect great profits. When the transaction is closed I find I have lost greatly. The seer in the first place was perhaps less than half the size of that in the other.’ The result was that grain markets in India remained local, and when famine struck in one area, people there died even though food was available elsewhere.

      The obvious advantages of exact measuring, and the tragic consequences of local variations, should have made it easy to impose reliable, uniform measures. Yet India has legislation on standard weights and measures dating from four thousand years ago, among the first in the world, while Europe received its inches and pounds from the Romans at the time of Christ. The reason that these systems collapsed is fundamental to the history of weights and measures. However much emperors and rulers might legislate for uniformity, the actual scales and grain containers were held by market traders, landlords and local magnates. They were a source of such profit that no one willingly gave them up, and in every locality throughout history, the clearest guide to where day-to-day power lay has always been the control of weighing and measuring.

      It was in 813 that Charlemagne, newly crowned as emperor of most of western Europe by the Pope, issued a famous edict which began ‘Volumus ut pondera vel mensurae ubique aequalia sint et insta’ (We desire that weights and measures should be equal and just everywhere). For nearly a thousand years thereafter, the goal of almost every French king could be expressed euphoniously as ‘ Un Roi, une foi, un poids’ (One king, one faith, one weight). In 1543, François I asserted bluntly that ‘the supreme authority of the King incorporates the right to standardise all measures throughout his kingdom’. But in 1790, according to an authoritative estimate, France possessed thirteen separate lengths for a pied or foot, eighteen for the aune or ell, and twenty-four for the boisseau or bushel. Since the seventy-four parishes of Angoulême near Bordeaux boasted over a hundred different sizes of boisseau between them, with one parish alone offering four separate varieties, this was something of an underestimate.

      Just as the power of the Dutch trading guilds was demonstrated by their ability to establish uniform measures for exports, so the bewildering variety in France was testimony to the feudal power of the seigneurs who retained the right to regulate local weights and measures. The emergence of Gunter’s chain as the one measure to determine the dimensions of landed property was due not just to its practicality but to the power of a particular class of people.

      On the face of it, England was in much the same position as France. In 960 King Edgar declared that ‘the measure of Winchester [England’s capital] shall be the standard’ for the whole kingdom; but the number of later monarchs who also demanded uniformity – the call for ‘one weight and one measure’ appears identically in Richard the Lionheart’s decree of 1189 and twenty-six years later in Magna Carta – suggests that they were no more effective than their French counterparts.

      The most important of these medieval laws, enacted by Henry III in 1266, introduced the sterling system linking weights to coinage, so that there were 240 pennyweights to the pound, a ratio that persisted in the currency for over seven hundred years until 1972 in Britain, and in North America until superseded by the dollar. It failed to prevent most of Henry’s successors finding it necessary to pass laws against ‘false and deceitful measures’, and in 1496 one of them, Henry VII, took the curiously modern step of dumping the sterling pound in favour of a European unit, the Troy pound. Yet in 1588, less than a century later, his granddaughter Elizabeth I had to introduce still more legislation, which she explained was ‘called forth by the uncertainty of the weights then in use, to the great slander of the realm and decency of many, both buyers and sellers’.

      It is against this background of incessant variation, deceit and falsehood in weights and measures that the precision of Gunter’s chain needs to be set. More than any of her predecessors, Elizabeth was responsive to the power of the House of Commons and the people represented there. The contrast between the way she legislated for weight and for length and area was significant.

      Where weight was concerned, she found it necessary to add to the Troy system the heavier avoirdupois (meaning literally ‘having weight’) range, which went from ounces through pounds and stones to hundredweights and tons. Troy was ideal for measuring small items like gold and silver, but the main English export was wool, which was traded in elephantine quantities and in the Flemish markets was always weighed in avoirdupois. It was a concession to variability to use a goldsmith’s weights for light objects and a wool merchant’s for heavy ones, and a similar surrender appeared in Elizabeth’s decision to legislate for a large gallon for measuring beer and a small gallon for wine. Adding to the confusion, sloppy wording of the specifications for containers resulted in four different sizes of bushel being legalised for measuring grains and flour.

      By contrast the specifications for length were both simple and accurate. ‘Foure graines of barley make a finger,’ ran Elizabeth’s law, ‘foure fingers a hande; foure handes a foote.’ Three of these feet made a yard, and 1760 yards made a mile. This was the first time the length of a mile had been specified, and although the other dimensions were not altogether new, the need to state them legally for the flourishing market in land certainly was. In 1601, a brass yardstick of thirty-six inches was constructed as a standard for the country as a whole. Exactness was what the market required, and when Elizabeth’s yard was measured in 1797 against the inches, feet and yards used by eighteenth-century scientists, it was found to be precisely 36.015 inches long.

      Elizabeth had the energy and administrative skill of a great ruler. She not only ordered new standards to be made for these weights and measures but sent copies to fifty-eight market towns with instructions that a description of them was to be pinned up in every church and read during the service twice a year for the next four years. For good and ill, it is to her that the credit must go for creating a system of weights and measures that was to persist for almost four hundred years, eventually covering all of Britain, and almost a quarter of the globe.

      All in all, it was a measuring age. Accurate measurement was becoming vital to the navigation of England’s mariners, who used Gunter’s cross-staffe and quadrant to find latitude in the trackless ocean, and most notably to Francis Drake in circumnavigating the globe. It was critical to the founding father of the scientific method, Francis Bacon, who advocated measurement and experimentation as the basis of science. When Elizabethans met, they took one another’s measure, they danced tightly paced measures like the galliard and volta, and measured their poetry to the short – long rhythm of iambic pentameters. ‘Marry, if you would put me to verses or to dance for your sake, Kate, why you undid me,’ exclaims rough King Harry wooing his French princess with puns in Henry V. ‘For the one I have neither words nor measure, and for the other I have no strength in measure, yet a reasonable measure in strength.’

      It was a joke tailored to a particular audience. Without measure, music was noise, poetry babble, and the land wilderness, and none knew it better than the enclosing, acquisitive gentry, the generation whose parents and grandparents first bought their land from Henry VIII, who stamped the Elizabethan age with their energy and imagination, and for whose benefit the legislation on measures was passed.

      John Winthrop was just such a man. His family had acquired their five-hundred-acre estate of Groton Manor in East Anglia from Henry VIII, and he himself was a vigorous encloser and improver of the land. It was as much the downturn in rents and farm prices as his Puritan ideals that persuaded Winthrop in 1630 to volunteer to take charge of the colony that the Massachusetts Bay Company proposed to create in Boston. Authoritarian, clear-sighted and charismatic, he was the colony’s first governor and imbued it not only with his ideals of communal responsibility and individual conscience, but with his attitude to property.

      Although the royal patent gave the colonists the right to settle in New England, there were those, notably Roger Williams, founder of the Rhode Island colony, who felt that the land rightly belonged to the native inhabitants and should first