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?

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.

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 17? 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.