Rescue the Rundlet
A "metric martyr", I saw it reported the other day, drove all the way from Harlow, Essex to Tenterden, Kent to root out an illegal road sign. Tony Bennett, aged 54, manager of the UK Independence party's Guard the Yard campaign, has admitted unbolting 29 signs and spraying others with paint. But it isn't he who is breaking the law, he maintains: it's the road signs. They give distances in kilometres, where the law requires miles.
Such public-spirited action, regardless of personal risk, is surely to be applauded. Yet it raises some potentially painful questions for some of the older citizens now guarding the yard. Where were they when faceless bureaucrats were inserting the thin end of the wedge? Did they muster to safeguard the wey, the kilderkin or the chaul dron? How hard did they fight to defend the beleaguered rod, pole or perch?
Britain's system of weights and measures may have been complex but it used to be presented with pride on the back of exercise books. Twelve inches, one foot; three feet, one yard; 1760 yards (an easy figure to remember, 1760, since that was the year when George III came to the throne), one mile. Sixteen ounces, one pound; 14 pounds, one stone; two stones, one quarter; 56 quarters, one hundredweight.
Compare that with the mindlessly simple multiplication by 10 that is all that the metric system demands. Where is the challenge to eager young minds in that? The UKIP must surely have spotted the clear correlation between the failure to print these ancient rules on the backs of exercise books and the rise in juvenile crime. Did we have all this graffiti around when children were busy trying to remember the number of stones in a hundredweight? Of course not.
Moreover, where the metric system was the work of arid and probably faceless theoreticians - and regicidal theoreticians at that, since they executed Louis XVI before they got round to designing the metre - our tried and trusted systems are rooted in common everyday experience. The origin of the yard, it is said, is the distance between the nose of King Henry I and the end of his arm. Since then, of course, other, more scientific definitions have been adopted: an act of 1878 nattily established it as "the straight line or distance between the centres of two gold plugs or pins in the bronze bar... measured when the bar is at the temperature of 62 degrees of Fahrenheit's thermometer, and when it is supported by bronze rollers placed under it in such a manner as best to avoid flexure of the bar". That's not, I guess, a computation most people can do in their heads so perhaps a king's arm is still better.
The acre - the English acre, that is to say: the Scots, the Irish, the Cornish and even the people of Cheshire had their own, which were different - was based on the amount of land a yoke of oxen could plough in a day. Compare that with the pesky hectare, equivalent to 2.471 acres. Who nowadays has the faintest idea of how much land 2.471 yokes of oxen can plough in a day?
The rod, pole or perch was 5.5 yards - exactly the range, we are told of a measuring rod (or at least, of a measuring rod set to 5.5 yards). True, it could also mean an area of 30.25 square yards, but properly brought up children would soon learn to spot the difference. A hide - another lost cause I'm afraid - was the amount of land required to support a household. (This too, I guess must have been set on a sliding scale, according to whether the household was Henry VIII's or that of an Exmoor cottager.)
A chain - 22 yards - is perhaps the simplest of all: it's the length of a cricket pitch. True, this is Gunter's chain, as used by surveyors, as opposed to Ramden's, favoured by engineers, which runs to 100 feet, but a game or two on a cricket pitch 100 feet long would soon have alerted most young Englishmen to the difference.
Just as campaigners against a decimal currency used no doubt to tell themselves that the rot set in when the English sold the pass on the groat, so I dare say many in the Guard the Yard campaign sometimes chat round their camp fires about the casual neglect by their forebears which opened the way to so-called reform. In the final analysis, the opportunity for faceless people in Whitehall to sell out our national heritage owes more than a little to those who failed to stand by the virgate.
Yet perhaps, as so often nowadays, an essential part of our island story is being suppressed. Though they may not feature in programmes by Simon Schama, it could just be that predecessors of the Guard the Yard campaign marched in vehement protest under banners which said: Fight for the Frail (1); Rescue the Rundlet (2); Stand by the Sulung (3); or, Don't Let Them Mess with the Manus (4). If so, what better time than a royal jubilee weekend to celebrate these forgotten champions of the Englishman's right to go on doing things just as he's always done.
(1) 50 lbs. (2) 18 gallons (3) 2 hides, though only in Kent. (4) 2 ounces. A wey, by the way, is 6.5 tods. See also assorted websites on Google, especially: members.aol.com/Jack Proot/met/spvolas.html
d.mckie@guardian.co.uk
Such public-spirited action, regardless of personal risk, is surely to be applauded. Yet it raises some potentially painful questions for some of the older citizens now guarding the yard. Where were they when faceless bureaucrats were inserting the thin end of the wedge? Did they muster to safeguard the wey, the kilderkin or the chaul dron? How hard did they fight to defend the beleaguered rod, pole or perch?
Britain's system of weights and measures may have been complex but it used to be presented with pride on the back of exercise books. Twelve inches, one foot; three feet, one yard; 1760 yards (an easy figure to remember, 1760, since that was the year when George III came to the throne), one mile. Sixteen ounces, one pound; 14 pounds, one stone; two stones, one quarter; 56 quarters, one hundredweight.
Compare that with the mindlessly simple multiplication by 10 that is all that the metric system demands. Where is the challenge to eager young minds in that? The UKIP must surely have spotted the clear correlation between the failure to print these ancient rules on the backs of exercise books and the rise in juvenile crime. Did we have all this graffiti around when children were busy trying to remember the number of stones in a hundredweight? Of course not.
Moreover, where the metric system was the work of arid and probably faceless theoreticians - and regicidal theoreticians at that, since they executed Louis XVI before they got round to designing the metre - our tried and trusted systems are rooted in common everyday experience. The origin of the yard, it is said, is the distance between the nose of King Henry I and the end of his arm. Since then, of course, other, more scientific definitions have been adopted: an act of 1878 nattily established it as "the straight line or distance between the centres of two gold plugs or pins in the bronze bar... measured when the bar is at the temperature of 62 degrees of Fahrenheit's thermometer, and when it is supported by bronze rollers placed under it in such a manner as best to avoid flexure of the bar". That's not, I guess, a computation most people can do in their heads so perhaps a king's arm is still better.
The acre - the English acre, that is to say: the Scots, the Irish, the Cornish and even the people of Cheshire had their own, which were different - was based on the amount of land a yoke of oxen could plough in a day. Compare that with the pesky hectare, equivalent to 2.471 acres. Who nowadays has the faintest idea of how much land 2.471 yokes of oxen can plough in a day?
The rod, pole or perch was 5.5 yards - exactly the range, we are told of a measuring rod (or at least, of a measuring rod set to 5.5 yards). True, it could also mean an area of 30.25 square yards, but properly brought up children would soon learn to spot the difference. A hide - another lost cause I'm afraid - was the amount of land required to support a household. (This too, I guess must have been set on a sliding scale, according to whether the household was Henry VIII's or that of an Exmoor cottager.)
A chain - 22 yards - is perhaps the simplest of all: it's the length of a cricket pitch. True, this is Gunter's chain, as used by surveyors, as opposed to Ramden's, favoured by engineers, which runs to 100 feet, but a game or two on a cricket pitch 100 feet long would soon have alerted most young Englishmen to the difference.
Just as campaigners against a decimal currency used no doubt to tell themselves that the rot set in when the English sold the pass on the groat, so I dare say many in the Guard the Yard campaign sometimes chat round their camp fires about the casual neglect by their forebears which opened the way to so-called reform. In the final analysis, the opportunity for faceless people in Whitehall to sell out our national heritage owes more than a little to those who failed to stand by the virgate.
Yet perhaps, as so often nowadays, an essential part of our island story is being suppressed. Though they may not feature in programmes by Simon Schama, it could just be that predecessors of the Guard the Yard campaign marched in vehement protest under banners which said: Fight for the Frail (1); Rescue the Rundlet (2); Stand by the Sulung (3); or, Don't Let Them Mess with the Manus (4). If so, what better time than a royal jubilee weekend to celebrate these forgotten champions of the Englishman's right to go on doing things just as he's always done.
(1) 50 lbs. (2) 18 gallons (3) 2 hides, though only in Kent. (4) 2 ounces. A wey, by the way, is 6.5 tods. See also assorted websites on Google, especially: members.aol.com/Jack Proot/met/spvolas.html
d.mckie@guardian.co.uk
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