Inefficiently run and casually disposed of, the royal estate which had once produced enough to pay for much of royal government now generated such a small income that the monarch was forced to rely on Parliament to raise taxes in order to run the kingdom. Imperceptibly, power was passing from the land-poor Crown to the land-rich gentry. And a few years later, when it was proposed to plant colonies in the new-found land of America, those who had the money to invest were the same gentry and the merchants, people who could measure their property and count its worth, and not the king.
This was the power contained in the untidy chain that lay round the feet of Rufus Putnam’s effigy in the museum at Marietta, Ohio. What Edmund Gunter had devised was a means of making private property. So long as it was the acre that expanded or shrank, while the price remained the same, no true market in land could be established. Once the earth could be measured by a unit that did not vary, supply and demand would determine the price, and it could be treated as a commodity. That was not Gunter’s intention, but it was a consequence of the accuracy that was built into his measuring device.
WHAT MAKES MEASUREMENT fundamentally important is that it allows the exchange of goods and services to take place. Measuring a length of cloth or a herd of animals or a day’s labour gives it a value in terms of size, or number, or achievement, which enables others in the community to offer something else – food, protection, even love or loyalty – of equivalent value. Consequently measurement is almost as necessary to human society as language, and it occurs in the earliest civilisations, long before the development of writing.
Incised bone and clay counters used for counting or exchange have been found at Neolithic village sites in Turkey dating from the ninth millennium BC – more than ten thousand years ago – while the Sumerian cuneiform script, which is usually accepted as the earliest form of writing, does not appear until five thousand years later. It is significant that many of the clay tablets bearing the cuneiform script refer to measurements of quantity, weight and length. Without the ability to measure, co-operative activity could hardly take place. With it, marketplaces and increasingly sophisticated economies can develop, matching barter, cash or credit to whatever is owned by one person and desired by another.
What made Edmund Gunter’s chain unique among commonly used measurements was that it did not vary. There were other chains in use, and as late as 1796 an American surveying manual suggested that in woodland a chain might measure twenty-four yards and in dense forest as much as thirty-two. But wherever a ‘Gunter’s chain’ was specified, it meant precisely one hundred links or twenty-two yards, and an area measuring ten of his chains in length by ten of his chains in breadth would always contain ten acres. In 1607, it was hard to find another measure that was so consistent.
Where modern economics would alter the price of a commodity, the usual practice before the sixteenth century was to change the size of the measure. Confectionery manufacturers do the same today, because children associate a particular price with a particular sweet, and less resentment is caused by shrinking the bar than by increasing the price. For similar reasons, the Vatican city authorities in the fifteenth century required bakers to sell loaves of bread at a fixed price, increasing the size when flour was cheap and reducing it when flour was dear.
Even in the financially sophisticated Netherlands, where banks, corporations and a stock exchange existed from the sixteenth century, it remained the custom in the textiles market to charge the same price per stone (fourteen pounds) for good flax from Zeeland as for the inferior kind from Brabant, but to make up the difference by using a lighter weight for the stone. The Dutch milling trade followed the same pattern – selling flour in larger measures to wholesalers than to retailers, but charging the same to both. At the other end of Europe in the port of Riga, the centre of trade in the Baltic and a major partner in the trading association known as the Hanseatic League, the Latvians quoted a single price on the salt fish they sold to Russian merchants, Ukrainian nobility and their Hanseatic partners, but measured them out in different scales and containers according to the importance of the customer. Accusations about false weights abound in the cahiers de doléance, the great lists of complaints that French citizens compiled in 1789, but even they were prepared to accept that using different weights was often fair. As the Sens assembly in Burgundy argued, by using smaller containers to measure out flour in remote villages, traders could charge those far from the market the same price as those nearer to it, and ‘the differences in measures are such as to defray the costs of transport’.
Just as an acre of rough pasture was larger than an acre of meadow which could produce hay, so a bushel of oats, which would only make porridge, held more than a bushel of wheat, which could be made into bread, and weak beer suitable only for quenching the thirst was gauged by a large gallon while wine which intoxicated the mind was sparingly measured in a small gallon. The principle applied equally to textiles, wood and other commodities. An ell of coarse cloth was longer than an ell of fine material, a cord of green firewood bulkier than one of dry. Each unit varied not only according to place but according to the benefit it yielded to the buyer. In short, what was being measured was not a quantity but its local, subjective, human value.
The measures themselves were derived from human activity and the shape of the human body itself. Almost universal was the width of the thumb or finger, which was equivalent to an inch, and in the first century AD, Vitruvius gave the classic definition of its relationship to other measures: ‘four fingers make one palm, and four palms make one foot; six palms make one cubit; four cubits make once a man’s height’. A bushel originated with the amount of seed required to sow an acre of ground – the actual amount varied even more than the size of the acre – while the ell, used for cloth, was either the width of the loom, or the distance from head to wrist (the easiest way to measure woven material is to hold it with an outstretched arm from the chin). Equally organic, and still less exact, were units like the bowshot (the distance an arrow would fly), the houpée (how far a shout would carry) and, among the Plains Indians of the United States, the horse-belly view (the furthest a person could see over the prairies when squatting beneath a mustang – approximately two miles).
The weakness of these variable measures was the scope they offered for cheating. From the beginning of writing, and probably earlier, there have been denunciations of those who used false measures. The commonest deceit was simply to use two sets of weights and containers, a large one for buying, a small for selling, and from the earliest times there is evidence of sacred and secular authorities thundering against the practice. ‘Thou shalt not have in thy bag diverse weights, a great and a small,’ runs the Jewish law in the Book of Deuteronomy, ‘but thou shalt have a perfect and just weight, a perfect and just measure shalt thou have, that thy days may be lengthened in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.’ The Koran inveighs in similar fashion, ‘Woe to those who stint the measure. Who when they take by measure from others, exact the full, but diminish when they measure to others, or weigh to them.’
The existence of variable measures, with all their opportunities for fraud, stifled any wider trade because only those actually watching the wheat bushel being filled or the linen being stretched out knew the quantities involved. The success of the great medieval trade fairs at Troyes in Champagne was largely due to the town’s capacity to impose its own measures on traders; but it was the Dutch, the first great exporting nation in Europe, who understood the advantage of accuracy better than anyone. According to the English economist Josiah Child, writing in 1668, the booming trade that produced their astonishing prosperity in the seventeenth century was largely based on ‘their exact marking of all their Native Commodities’. The Netherlands’ major export was fish – herring and cod packed into huge barrels called hogsheads which were supposed to contain sixty-four gallons. Child noted that the Dutch measures were so reliable ‘that the repute of their said Commodities abroad continues always good, and the Buyers will accept of them by the marks, without opening; whereas the Fish which our English make in Newfound-Land and New-England, and Herrings at Yarmouth … often prove false and deceitfully made, seldom containing the quantity for which the Hogsheads are marked’.
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