110 Agricultural Weights and Measures. 
three Glasgow ones. The seven very important markets which 
use these divergent bolls should unite on their abolition. 
Unusual local weights may in some cases have originally 
been measures, but as a fixed quantity is now legally due by 
local custom they must be treated purely as weights. They 
include the windle of Preston and the hohhet of Denbigh, 
the first of 220 lb., the second of 168 lb. Neither fits in with 
any recognisable scale or table, though the last named may 
be a 3-bushel measure where the bushel was' 56 lb. It is a 
curious feature of this hohhet that twelve of them make the 
exact and very odd weight of 2,016 lb., which is said by some 
to be the original chaldron , of which 504 lb. is the quarter. As 
504 lb. constitutes the old East Anglian quarter, the matter 
may repay further research. The subject has been alluded 
to quite recently ( The Standard, October 1, 1906), but no 
evidence beyond old farmers’ hearsay is apparently adducible 
thus far. On this hypothesis the hobbet may have been a 
sack, for in selling lime and some other articles, twelve sacks 
still make a chaldron. 
A very large proportion of transactions is put through in 
the agricultural world by avoirdupois weight, which by its 
name reveals its French origin. This weight in its modern 
form is singularly cumbrous ; 16 oz. which make 1 lb. and 
8 stones which make 1 cwt. seem to be survivals of the octave, 
while the 20 cwt. which make 1 ton appear to belong to the 
decimal system. The 14 lb. which make 1 stone appertains 
to a rare and probably religious and astronomical scheme of 
7 which Ave may call the Septet. The history of this weight, 
which we owe to the Plantagenets or to the Normans, would 
require more research than we can give to it, and its utterly 
amorphous character renders its abolition a crying necessity. 
Its continued employment costs may thousands of pounds 
yearly in cumbrous account keeping. Among bodies still using 
it for agricultural tables, are the Irish Department of Agricul- 
ture, the British Custom House, and the Conservative Central 
Association in their Constitutional Year Book for 1906. The 
latter, however, in their 72nd fiscal table adopt the useful unit 
of pounds, raising the unit to a million by pointing off six figures 
to the right. 
An old Scots’ scale of 8 is decidedly interesting. It is not 
yet extinct : — 
4 lippies = 1 peck. 
4 pecks = 1 firlot. 
4 firlots = 1 boll. 
2 bolls = 1 quarter. 
8 quarters = 1 chalder. 
In this rather elaborate system where the quarter is not a 
“ quarter ” of anything, though there are three items out of 
