THE POUND

Evening Star, Issue 21233, 14 October 1932, Page 12

THE POUND

HOW WE GOT IT Ancient ancestry . GOLD BY WEIGHT. The ancestry of the pound, like that of the- yard, is immemorially ancient. Indeed, far back in the dawn of history, it would seem that the basic unit of length'was also the basic unit of weight. The talent, the chief weight of the ancient East, was the weight of a cubic foot of water. It was divided on several different principles, but in the end decimally, into 100 mime. The mma was taken over by the Romans, who called it “libra,” or “ pondus : the latter word gives us our “ pound, the first letter of the former survives in the symbol, £. This Roman pound, says a winter in ‘ John o’ London’s Weekly,’ became the commercial unit all over the Western Europe, though its actual weight, as the unity of Roman civilisation collapsed in the Dark Ages, began to vary from place to place. Still, the merchants of London, of Paris, of Cologne, of Milan, would all weigh their goods with lumps of metal of roughly the same size; and throughout what had been the Roman Empire, the idea survived that there was such a thing as a pound internationally valid, however much tradesmen might wrangle about its precise weight., But the pound was not only the standard for the shopkeeper’s goods; it was also the standard for the king s money. One pound of fine silver was the recognised measure of value. Now, from the earliest times we constantly find in all countries that the king’s pound is different from the merchant’s. Tins is no doubt partly because it is beneath the king’s dignity to measure in the same way as lesser men; for instance, the Egyptian royal cubit is 2in longer than the common cubit, the king being a bigger man than his subjects, with a longer arm. But it is to bo feared that in the case of weight a more potent reason has operated, in the constant temptation besetting all hardpressed Governments to depreciate the coinage by reducing its weight. The medieval King of England saw no reason why he should weigh out as much silver for a pound as the miller weighed flour; and so we find in Anglo-Saxon times a mint pound, which is recognised to be definitely lighter than the pound of commerce. This pound of the Saxon moneyers was kept by the Norman kings in the Tower of London, and became known as the pound tower, as distinct from the commercial pound avoirdupois (corrupted from “ aver,” “ goods,” and “ pois,” “ weight,” in Norman French). INTERNATIONAL COMPLICATIONS. In multiplication and division these two pounds, being used by different people and for different purposes, came to be differently treated. Avoirdupois was organised on the binary system, the key number being 16, or 2x2x2x2. Thus 16 pounds at first made a stone, and 16 stones made a wey; similarly the pound was subdivided into 16 ounces, and the ounce into 16 drams. It was unfortunate, and contained the seeds of future trouble, that dealers in large weights took to using, side by side with the binary, a decimal system under which 100 pounds made a hundredweight and twenty hundredweight a ton. 1 International complications wrecked this system. Under Edward I. and Edward HI. foreign trade was increasing by leaps' and bounds, more particularly with France and Flanders. Now, in these countries the Roman pound had become standardised at a weight different from that of avoirdupois, the pound troy; and the measure for larger weights was the quintal, or 100 pounds troy, equivalent to rather more than a hundredweight avoirdupois. It was apparently in the endeavour to bring the hundredweight into line with the quintal, and so facilitate international transactions, that the English kings embarked on a series of complicated statutes revising their units. The hundredweight was increased, first to 108 pounds and then to 112, at which it still remains. For the purpose intended the first figure is too low and the second too high, the right figure being 109.7. But the innovations did not stop there. An attempt was made to bring the stone into line with. the new “ long hundredweight,” and its weight was accordingly reduced from 16 pounds to 14. This gives us the table 14 pounds, 1 stone; 2 stone, 1 quarter; 4 quarters, lewt. The ton kept at 20 of the new hundredweights, and so raised to the inconvenient figure of 2,240 pounds. The upshot of the whole was that binary and decimal division were inextricably interwoven with a new basic number, 7; and, to make confusion worse confounded, several trades clung to units of the old standard. To this day 16 pounds make a stone of cheese, and the fishmonger retains, under the name of stone, what was formerly the clove, or half-stone, of 8 pounds. THE POUND TROY. The pound tower, as expressed in the coinage, proved a variable unit, as successive kings reduced the of pure silver in the nominal penny. This penny was divided, on the binary scale, into 32 wheat-corns, but although this proportion remained fixed the Government tended to choose their wheatcorns lighter and lighter. But for measuring the precious metals the Continental standard of pounds troy (supposed to be named from the town of Troyes) was gaining ground all through the fifteenth century, and in 1527 Henry VII. proclaimed its adoption in England in place of the pound tower. More exactly, ho adopted the troy ounce, for the pound troy, like the pound avoirdupois, was of 16 ounces and

much heavier than the pound tower. In England, however, the unit now adopted under the name of the pound troy was 12 troy ounces, making about £oz more than the old pound tower, which, as we have seen, was also divided into 12 ounces. The coinage was, of course, long since divorced from any real relation with the standard weight; but when the gold standard superseded the silver the sovereign was defined in grains troy; and bullion payments arc still made by this otherwise obsolescent standard. Though the 2,0001 b ton of tho old avoirdupois measures of weight are linked with measures of capacity; tho chaldron, lidding about a ton of wheat, was divided into 4 quarters, and thou in successive divisions by 2 right down to tho noggin. It is true that when tho ton avoirdupois was increased by statute tile legal chaldron was raised from 32 to 36 bushels, thus disturbing the binary series; but tho chaldron is now obsolete, and the old table of pints, quarters, gallons, pecks, and bushels survives as a model of simplicity compared with our other weights and measures. But then, until very recent times, the one thing the Englishman would not stand was any monkeying with his pint of ale.