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two grains of which equipoise the penny of the old tower pound; while the wheat that forms the gallon of two hundred and twentyfour inches, is that of which thirty-two kernels weigh a penny weight troy. The weight of the corn in both gallons would be the same; but that, of which each kernel upon the average would be one sixteenth heavier than those of the other, would, by the combined proportion of gravity and numbers, occupy one thirty-second less of space. This is precisely the difference between the gallons of two hundred and twenty-four and two hundred and thirty-one solid inches.

The debasement of the coin had destroyed its original identity with the money weight. The substitution of troy weight, instead of the old easterling pound, for the composition of the gallon, destroyed the coincidence between the water gallon, derived from the ton, the eighth part of the cubic foot, and the wine gallon, containing eight money pounds of wheat. The wine gallon of two hundred and twenty-four, or two hundred and thirty-one cubic inches, no longer bore the same proportion to the cubic foot of water; one consequence of which was, that the hogshead of Bordeaux wine, which the law required to contain sixty-three gallons, no longer contained that number of English gallons; but, from that day to this, has contained from fifty-nine to sixty-one. It still contains at least sixty-three Irish gallons.

The act of 12 Henry VII, (1496,) intended, upon the face of it, to be a mere repetition of the statutes of 1266, and 1304, was thus a total subversion of them. It was founded upon two mistakes; the first, a supposition that the penny sterling, described in those statutes, was the penny weight troy; and the second, a belief that it was the measure, and not the weight, of eight gallons of wine, which constituted the bushel. The causes of these mistakes were, first, that, in the lapse of two centuries, a great portion of which had been a period of calamity and civil war, the successive debasements of the coin had reduced the penny sterling to about half its weight as it was when made the standard of comparison with thirty-two kernels of wheat; and finding that the penny sterling of their own time, if used to make the new standard bushel, would reduce its size by nearly one half, which had perhaps been the mistake upon which the act of 1494 had been made, they must hastily have concluded that it was the penny weight troy, which was intended by the old statutes. The second was a misapplication of the term gallon, which, in its original meaning, and in its popular signification to this day, is exclusively a measure of liquids, and not of dry substances. In the statute of 1266, it is expressly called the gallon of wine. In the act of 1304, it was called the gallon, without addition, but meaning the same wine gallon. The measure for corn was the bushel; and its subdivisions were the peck, pottle, and pint. The eighth part of the measure of a bushel was first called a gallon, because it was used as the measure of the ordinary liquids brewed from grain, beer and ale. There never was properly any corn gallon; and the term was misapplied even to denote the measure of beer. Being a vessel of different dimensions, it ought

to have had a different name; and that alone would have prevented them from ever being mistaken the one for the other.

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The parliament of 1496 were seduced by those expressions, so often re-echoed from year to year, and from century to century, that there should be but one weight, and one measure, throughout the land. They mistook the uniformity of proportion, for the uniformity of identity. They construed the threefold "one measure of wine, and one measure of ale, and one measure of corn," ordained in Magna Charta, as if it meant that those three one measures should be the same. That these mistakes should be made, is not surprising when we consider that, in 1496, the art of printing was but in the cradle; that no collection of the statutes had ever been printed; that the languages in which the statutes of 1266, and 1304, had been enacted, the Norman French, and the barbarous Latin of the thirteenth century, were no longer in use, at least in parliament; that the very records, by which the weight of the penny sterling in 1266 might have been ascertained, were, perhaps, not known to exist. But it is not so easy to explain how they could mistake the penny of the old easterling pound, which was still, and continued for forty years after to be, used at the mint for coining money, for the penny troy weight.

We have seen that, in 1804, the easterling pound of twelve ounces was the money pound, and that the corresponding commercial weight was a pound of fifteen of the same ounces. These were the result of

a rough and inaccurately settled proportion between the specific gravity of wheat and wine, or wheat and water. Mr. Jefferson has justly remarked, that the difference between the specific gravity of wine and of water is so small, that it may safely, as between buyer and seller, be disregarded. And it was disregarded by those two acts of parliament, one of which made the wine gallon an eighth part of the cubic foot of water, while the other made it equiponderant to eight easterling pounds of wheat. So the proportion of the two pounds of twelve and fifteen of the same ounces was, upon a rough estimate, that the proportional weight of wheat and wine was as four to five, or as fourteen to seventeen and a half; and it was afterwards assumed as of fourteen to seventeen. But if trade, and even legislation, may safely neglect small quantities, nature is no such accountant of more or less. It has been shown that the water gallon, of eight easterling twelve ounce pounds of wheat, corresponds with the gallon of two hundred and sixteen cubic inches, the eighth part of the cubic foot; but that, when a Bordeaux wine gallon is to be made, containing the same eight pounds of wheat, it produces a gallon, not of 216, but of 217.6 cubic inches. In the mode of forming the gallon and bushel, described in the act of 1266, it is not the loose calculations of man, but the unerring hand of nature, that establishes the proportions. The vessel that would hold eight money pounds of wheat was the wine gallon. The vessel that would balance, filled with wheat, eight gallons of that wine, was the bushel. Then, if a half peck of this Bushel was taken for a beer gallon, its proportion to the wine gallon

would not be of fifteen to twelve, nor of seventeen to fourteen, but of one hundred and seventy-five to one hundred and forty-three.

When the avoirdupois or the troy weights were first introduced into England, has been a subject of controversy among the English writers, and is not ascertained. The names of both indicate a French origin: but that no new weight or measure was brought in by the Norman Conqueror is certain, and the statute of weights and measures of 1304 proves that neither of them were then recognized by law. One of the most learned writers upon the coins, says that troy weights were first established by this statute of Henry VII. of 1496; that it was owing to the intercursus magnus, or great treaty of commerce concluded between England and Flanders the year before; that the Flemish pound was adopted as a compliment to the Duchess of Burgundy, and for the mutual convenience of all their payments, which would then be adjusted by the same pound.

This conjecture is ingenious, but not well founded. The statute of 1496 did, in fact, legitimate troy weight for the composition of the gallon and the bushel, but it professed, and intended to introduce, no new weight or measure. Its purpose was to re-enact the composition of weights and measures of 1266. It was a legislative error, intended to correct another error committed at the last preceding session of parliament in 1494, before the intercursus magnus was concluded. Instead of correcting the error, it rendered it irreparable. It was so far from correcting the error, that, although a standard wine gallon was made under this statute, which was the Guildhall wine gallon of two hundred and twenty-four inches, there never was a standard bushel made by the rule prescribed in this statute; and if there had been, its cubic contents would have been not one inch more or less than seventeen hundred and ninety-two.

The troy weight was never used by Henry VII. at the mint at all. He made a wine gallon by it, because the difference between a gallon of 217.6 inches, which was the old standard, and one of 224, which was made by his troy weights, was not large enough to make its incorrectness apparent. It was scarcely the difference of a small wine glass upon a gallon: and, as it was a difference of excess over the contents of the old standard, it might naturally be attributed to the decays or inaccuracy of that. He ordained that a bushel should be made by it; but a bushel made from the measure of his wine gal Ion, a bushel of seventeen hundred and ninety-two inches, would have contained at least three hundred and thirty inches, nearly twelve pounds in weight less than any of the old standards. This would have been found a difference utterly intolerable. It would have been necessary to recal and break up the new standards a second time, and to acknowledge a second error greater than the first. So the statute, so far as related to the composition of the bushel, was suffered to slumber upon the rolls; the old standard bushels were still retained; and new ones were also made, not by the troy, but by

* Clarke.

the avoirdupois pound of wheat: and hence it is that standard bushels of Henry the Seventh exist at the exchequer, one of 2124 inches, which is the old standard, and one of 2146 inches, which is the Winchester bushel, and, at the same time, corn gallons of 272 inches.

That the troy weight was not introduced into England by Henry the Seventh is further proved by two statutes; one of 1414, 2 Henry V. ch. 4, and one of 1423, 2 Henry VI. st. 2, ch. 4: in the first of which it is ordained, that the goldsmiths should give no silver worse than of the allay of the English sterling, and that they take for a pound of troy gilt but forty-six shillings and eight pence at the most; and, in the second, that silver, not coined, in plate, piece, or in mass, being of as good allay as the sterling, should not be sold for more than thirty shillings the pound troy, besides the fashion, because the same was of no more value at the coin than thirty-two shillings. The tower easterling pound was at that time coined into thirty shillings, and the value of the troy pound of the same alloy was, of course, thirty-two.

From these two statutes it is apparent that, nearly a century before Henry the Seventh, the troy pound was used by the goldsmiths, who were the bankers of that age, and were foreigners, for weighing bullion and plate; and that the proportion of the troy pound to the tower money pound was as sixteen to fifteen.

That the troy pound, though adopted by Henry the Seventh for the composition of the bushel and gallon, was not introduced by him at the mint, appears equally clear. About the middle of the last century, Martin Folkes published his tables of English coins, in which he cited a verdict remaining in the exchequer, dated 30th October, 1527, 18 Henry VIII. in which are the following words: "And "whereas, heretofore, the merchant paid for coynage of every pound "towre of fyne gold, weighing xi. oz. quarter troye, 2s. 6d. "Nowe it is determined by the King's highness, and his said coun"celle, that the aforesaid pounde towre shall be no more used and "occupied; but all manner of golde and sylver shall be wayed by the "pounde troye, which maketh xii. oz. troye, which excedith the "pounde towre in weight three quarters of the ounce." [Clarke, p. 15.]

A French record of much earlier date, from the register of the Chamber of Accounts at Paris, cited also by Folkes, shows that, early in the fourteenth century, there were among the weights in common use in France two marks, of different gravity, one of troy, and the other of Rochelle, in the same proportion to each other, and that the last was called the mark of England.

The Rochelle and easterling pound was therefore the same; and that was the pound, eight of which in spring water were contained in the eighth part of the cubic foot, and formed the gallon of 216

cubic inches.

This proportion, as has been observed, was totally destroyed by the substitution of the troy pound by Henry the Seventh, in 1496,

instead of the Rochelle pound, for the composition of the bushel and gallon.

As, by the treatise of weights and measures of 1304, only two weights are mentioned, by which it asserts that all things were weighed, this towre pound of twelve ounces, and the corresponding commercial pound of fifteen of the same ounces, it is clear that the troy weight was then unknown, or at least not used in England. But this reign of Edward the First was also the period when the foreign commerce of England began to flourish. In 1296, the famous mercantile society, called the Merchant Adventurers, had its first origin; and another society of natives of Lombardy, the great merchants of that age, about the same time established themselves in England, under the protection of a special charter of privileges from Edward. These Lombards soon became the goldsmiths and bankers in England. [Hume, vol. ii. p. 330, ch. 13.] In the year 1354, the balance of exports above the imports was of more than 250,000 pounds; and as the balances of that age could be paid for only in specie, whenever the balance was in favor of England it must have brought much foreign money into the kingdom. The pound of the goldsmiths and bankers was the troy weight, and by them, there can be little doubt, it was first introduced. The pound of fifteen ounces troy must have been introduced at the same time, by an accommodation of that weight to the old English rule-that when bullion and drugs were weighed by a pound of twelve ounces, all other things were weighed by a pound of fifteen of the same ounces. This pound of fifteen ounces, or 7200 grains troy, has never been recognized in England by law; but, in many parts of England, it has been used under the name of the merchant's weight: and eight such pounds of wheat form precisely the gallon of 280 cubic inches, of which the standard quart in the exchequer is the fourth part.

The time and occasion of the introduction of the avoirdupois pound into England is no better known than that of the troy weight. But it may be inferred, from the ancient statutes, that it was brought in by the same foreign merchants, with the troy, and as the corresponding weight to that as the weight for bullion and pharmacy. The first time that the term avoirdupois is used in the English statute book, is in the 9th of Edward III. stat. 1, ch. i. (1335,) the very statute which authorizes merchant strangers to buy or sell corn, wine, avoirdupois, flesh, fish, and all other provisions, and victuals, wool, cloths, wares, merchandises, and all other vendible articles in any part of England.

Eighteen years afterwards, in the celebrated statute staple of 1353, [27 Edward III. ch. 10.] is the following provision: "Forasmuch as we have heard that some merchants purchase avoirdupois, "woollens, and other merchandises, by one weight and sell by ano"ther, and also make deceivable diminutions upon the weight, and "also use false measures and yards, to the great deceit of us and of "all the commonalty and of honest merchants: We therefore will "and establish, that one weight, one measure, and one yard, be

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