Chapter XVIII
.)
The Quintal was 100 of these pounds, but long hundredweights were common. Its quarter was the Rub (Ar. _rouba_, four). These weights are nearly obsolete, as the possession of any weights not of the Republican system would be illegal. The measures of length and capacity are often slightly altered so as to be in metric units: the pán becomes a quarter-metre; groceries are often ticketed by the hectogramme, as this is known to coincide very closely with the old Southern quarter-pound.
We now pass to the Northern or Paris system, mostly taken from the South, and bearing evident traces of this origin.
2. THE NORTHERN SYSTEM
_Measures of Length_
The Roman foot survived in North France as the quarter of the Aune or ell, a measure = 46·77 inches. (Cf. the passetto or double braccio of Tuscany, of 4 palmi = 45·96 inches.) As a cloth-measure the Aune was divided, like our cloth-yard and ell, into eighths and sixteenths.
But there was also the pied de roi, the royal foot, one-sixth of the Toise, which = 76·73 inches = 1·949 metre.
The royal foot, = 12·789 inches, was divided into inches (pouces) of 12 lines, each of 12 points. Its standard was traditionally referred to Charlemagne, either to the length of his foot, or to a standard brought to him by the envoys of Harūn-al-Rashid. It coincides with half a Hashími cubit, 25·56/2 = 12·78 inches. This tradition must be dismissed; new measures are not introduced as standards in that way. It was simply one-sixth of the toise, which was a Cano from civilised South France, but its standard was so ill-kept as to be of doubtful exactitude. All that is known of its standard is that, about 1668, an iron rod was fixed in a wall of the Grand Chatelet in Paris and that the length of this rod was that of half the breadth of the eastern gateway of the Louvre-palace, which gateway was, according to the plans, 12 feet in breadth. This standard was, however, considered to be 5/12 inch short of the customary toise.
The Louvre standard, taking it at = 1·965 metre (which I find it by actual measurement), corresponds closely to the Cano of Beaucaire. This town on the southern Rhone, opposite Tarascon, had a great annual fair, and may thus have given its linear standard to trade in the same way that Marseilles passed the Cargo of its Egyptian corn-trade on to Paris as the Setier, and that Troyes passed the marc used at its great annual fair on to Paris as the standard of the French troy pound.[50]
Footnote 50:
There were relations between Burgundy and England. The former was, up to the fall of its powerful dukes in the sixteenth century, a state enjoying prosperity and independence, while France was mostly in a condition of misery. It had, and retained till quite recently, its system of measures and weights, derived from the southern system at the time when Arles was the capital of the kingdom of Burgundy. It had two toises, one = 7-1/2 French feet, the other, for field measure, = 9-1/2 French feet. Now the first seems to have passed to England, for a time at least, for the _Liber Albus_, 1419, contains an order for the City of London:
‘The Toise of pavement to be 7-1/2 feet in length, and the foot of St. Paul in breadth.’
The English wool-weights, the wey, stone (12 French lb.) and clove, were current in Burgundy and in Southern France.
But the royal foot was inconveniently long for popular use, and a practice arose of taking 11 inches of it as a customary foot = 11·7 inches. This reduced foot, coinciding almost exactly with the quarter-Aune, was much used in the districts north of Paris as the _pied de Ponthieu_, or _de Clermont_. The Brasse was a short fathom of 5 pieds = 5 ft. 4 in., probably an adaptation of the Roman pace. A _pas_ (pace), of half a brasse = 32 inches, is used in some districts for land-measurement.
_Measures of Distance_
There was no official measure of distance, such as our furlong and mile, between the toise and the league, and the league was very variable (see
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