Talk:Scottish units

Stone

Was a Scottish "stone" equal to 14 pounds like elsewhere? --McKay 02:58, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

Since the Scottish stone has not been used for a long time, this is a historical question. E.g. in the 1426 Assize of weights the stone was defined as 15 troy pounds. But since these were Scottish troy pounds of 16 ounces, that's equivalent to 20 English troy pounds. Many other definitions existed at various times and for various purposes. --Hans Adler (talk) 11:43, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

This article may be mostly obsolete

Recent research has shown that the connections between old Scottish units, old English units and even continental units were much simpler and more rational than what one would believe after reading this article. E.g. there was no difference between the Scottish and English inches and feet. The ell of 37 inches was also used in England for some time. It is also known that the Rhineland foot was in use in England: 1 rod = 16½ feet = 16 Rhineland feet, and an ell was just 3 Rhineland feet. This appears to have been the unit used in cloth trade with the continent. The Scottish troy pound is not even mentioned. It consisted of 16 ounces of the English troy pound of 12 ounces. And so on.

There is a wealth of information in the book by Connor and Simpson (2004): "Weights and Measures in Scotland". E.g. here are a few sentences regarding the inch:

Thus all three of the early surviving ell beds (the 1500 Inverkeithing ell, the sixteenth-century and 1663 Edinburgh ells) share a length of about 37.05 inches, and we can appreciate from the 1663 ell that these have been made to incorporate a play of about 0.05 inches […]. The difficulty that arises if the legal ell is considered to be even fractionally longer than 37 inches is that it may be understood as comprising 37 slightly larger inches. This situation arose in the eighteenth century when a larger ell was designated for specific administrative reasons, and also in the nineteenth century when misplaced antiquarian zeal erected an apparently independent Scottish inch on a determination of the length of the old Edinburgh ell (bed) as 37.06 inches. The fact is that the Scottish and English inches are identical.

I would like to correct these things while I have the book, but I realise that this topic is related to things like national identity. Any thoughts? --Hans Adler (talk) 12:26, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, I'm well aware that some people think that Scotland is a part of England (or wish it to be), but there is absolutely no reason to merge this article. Besides which, there are many units which do not have the same names as English ones. Even those which do, such as the acre and the mile are of different sizes. --MacRusgail (talk) 16:04, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

Sorry I wasn't clear. Of course this article is needed. I see now how my post can be understood as questioning its existence, although I intended the opposite. It's just that it seems to be based on the state of historic knowledge from around 1900, and it can't be updated without some radical changes. Currently there isn't much more than a list of units, but there is potential here for a real article of at least 5 times the current size.

Since you mention the miles: There is an interesting story here. In both systems the mile consisted of 8 furlongs. But the Scottish furlong was 40 falls of 6 ells each, while the English furlong was 40 rods. So the Scottish system had more internal consistency, because the English rod seems to have been based on the Rhineland foot and had the strange length of 16½ English feet. We should explain this kind of thing in the article, not just list the units.

But it really gets interesting with the weights. Scotland had its own versions of the Tower pound, troy pound and avoirdupois pound, and they had interesting connections with weight units in England, France and Flanders. You might want to have a look at this article: Connor, R.D. (1995). "The evolution of weighing". Canadian Chemical News. (It mentions Scotland only in passing, but the book applies these things to the Scottish burghs.)

The history of the Scottish standards (i.e. the physical objects) is also remarkable. It seems that over several centuries these were centrally distributed to the burghs.

I do think, however, that perhaps inch (Scots) could be merged into inch because they seem to have been the same unit after all. --Hans Adler (talk) 17:07, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

The only problem is that Scottish and English inches actually are not precisely the same. They are similar, but they are not the exact same unit whatever Connor may say. American units may have similar names and origins to the English ones, but that doesn't mean that they are identical by any means. In fact, there's a story (urban legend?) that NASA once botched a job based on misunderstandings about imperial units - the differences may have been small, but they were cumulative.--MacRusgail (talk) 15:28, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

True story, but not relevant; the trouble was, one party was using Imp meas, the other metrics...& neither bothered to check to see everybody was using the same.... 80 8/ TREKphiler ^{any time you're ready, Uhura} 16

45, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

Areas by taxation

I’ve altered this, as it made very little sense as it stood.
If the land area was based on the tax value, then it should be proportional to the value of the coins. If a groat equals four pennies, it is illogical for a pennyland to be twice as big as a groatland; and if two shillings is 24 pennies, ie 6 groats, a twoshilling land shouldn’t be smaller than a groatland.
This seems to have been extrapolated from the quarterland article, which is itself confused, and unreferenced; I’ve edited that as well.Moonraker12 (talk) 12:14, 7 August 2010 (UTC)

It's not tax, so much as rent. Plus some of these land measurement are by productivity, not taxation.-MacRusgail (talk) 21:37, 9 August 2010 (UTC) p.s. The quarterland article is not unreferenced. Try reading the bottom. Equivalences were not the same everywhere.

Proposed deletion of Joug

The article Joug has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

A search for references failed to find any support for any of the content in this article, fails WP:N and WP:V

While all contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, content or articles may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. The speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 16:32, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

Aye via Google no doubt, that highly respected academic tool...--MacRùsgail (talk) 16:49, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

Acre

The article on acre refers here for the Scottish acre, this article refers back. Could someone who knows please give the actual measure in at least one of the articles? 87.114.40.17 (talk) 05:29, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

I am going to fix this later, but to give you a quick answer: You can find apparently reliable information here. (I say it's apparently reliable because it is clearly informed by the most recent research by Connor and Simpson as opposed to just copying old claims.)

In short:

• 1 Scottish acre = 5760 square ells = 7,885,440 square inches.
• 1 English acre = 4850 square yards = 6,285,600 square inches.

The Scottish inch was precisely the same as the English inch. (The source explains how the misconception that it was slightly longer arose.) A very long time ago, the ell of 37 inches and the yard of 36 inches coexisted in both countries. The yard was used for measuring land and the ell was used for measuring cloth. (The main target market for English and Scottish cloth since Roman times had been Cologne, which used the Rhenanian foot of 31.39 cm. A yard was less than 3 Rhenanian feet, but 37 inches was practically the same as 3 Rhenanian feet.) England later got rid of the ell, and Scotland got rid of the yard.

The Scottish acre was roughly 25.45% more than the English acre. Hans Adler 09:31, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

"The Scottish inch was precisely the same as the English inch" - Actually it's not, as I have said repeatedly.--MacRùsgail (talk) 16:57, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

Moved

There is no reason to keep such an unhelpful and overlong title, when WP:TERSE and WP:PRIMARYTOPIC helpfully permit us to use shorter ones. The article should mention these units are obsolete, but that doesn't have to go in the title. No one is going to be looking for the metric system or imperial system by looking for "Scottish measurements"; people come here looking for the peculiarly Scottish system... which happens to be obsolete. See also English units.

People won't come here looking for the Scottish army but I'll go ahead and add a hatnote to it since "Scottish unit(s)" naturally appears frequently in reference to Scottish military units. — LlywelynII 02:07, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

Potential inconsistency in length/distance units

I notice that the article states that the English/imperial and Scottish inches have the same value, yet the values of larger units do not agree with those of the corresponding English units (e.g. the foot of 305.3 mm is somewhat larger than the English foot of 304.8 mm, and would indicate a Scottish inch of around 25.442 mm) – this is presumably a discrepancy introduced by rounding. For this reason, I feel it would be most appropriate to indicate this in the body of the article. Archon 2488 (talk) 22:05, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

Also, it is wrong to refer to the 25.4mm inch as English, as though it had been around for centuries. The inch has been defined as 25.4 and the yard as 914.4 only since 1959 and that was a UK, USA, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa thing. It is currently enshrined in UK law in the Weights and Measures Act 1985. It followed on from a succession of standardisations from the mid-19th century onwards, usually driven by scientific advances. So variations in units of measure between countries had been normal, as were regional variations. One such example being the pouce or french inch, which, never having survived as an accredited unit of measure into the modern age, existed in a range of sizes of tradesmans' thumbs with only the vaguest record of regional standardisations. Other wikipedia articles support statements. 217.16.213.104 (talk) 03:35, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

For the purpose of this article, the column "English" means "measures used in England when these measures were used in Scotland".

According to Inch#History

An Anglo-Saxon unit of length was the barleycorn. After 1066, 1 inch was equal to 3 barleycorns, which continued to be its legal definition for several centuries, with the barleycorn being the base unit. One of the earliest such definitions is that of 1324, where the legal definition of the inch was set out in a statute of Edward II of England, defining it as "three grains of barley, dry and round, placed end to end, lengthwise".

Therefore, to give any decimal places for the metric dimension of the traditional English inch, is a good example of false precision. So perhaps a footnote is needed in the cases where the 1959 definition is being used? --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 10:54, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

References

Fluid volumes

Fluid volumes table has column Dimensions with sub-column SI having cubic inches as units. Inches are not SI units so I think that the column should be renamed or removed. Zamdee (talk) 20:02, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

Thank for spotting this. It is such a howler that I am amazed that it took until now to pick it up. I have deleted that column. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 20:47, 16 July 2024 (UTC)