42
NOTES AND QUERIES. [io<" s. m. JAX. 21, IMS.
tugal exactly, to a hundredth of an inch, the
Roman palmus (equal to 8 '74 inches) is di videc
into 12 dedos or digits. The modern Roman
palmo (equal to 8'79 inches) is, or was, of 12
oncie, and the foot>,piede, is of 16 ; this support
the view that the ancient uncia was, originally
at least, the twelfth of the palmus major.
Passing to the foot the Greek pous (the Olympic foot, two- thirds of the Egyptian com- mon cubit) wasdivided, like the modern Roman piede, into 16 daktuloi, of which the span had 12. The Roman foot, originally the same as the Greek foot, was shortened so that 5,000 feet should make the Greek land-mile of stadia. It is probable that there were two divisions of the Roman foot : the original, into 16 uncice or diyiti ; a later one into 12 pollices, thumb-breadths, sometimes called uncice in the generic sense of twelfths, the imcia occupying the honorary position as the twelfth of the foot, while favpollex (It. pollice, Fr. pouce) was the actual twelfth. The L. oncia, from Gr. oy/a'a, connected with 6'w, certainly had the original meaning of a nail, a nail-breadth, and was thus akin to unguis. In India we find the span divided into 12 ungli, or nails. In France once or oince meant a nail.
In England for many centuries there was the same double series of lineal measures as in other countries. From the span came the popular ell- measures the Flemish ell of 3 spans, the English and Scottish yard-ell of 4 spans, the English ell of 5 spans, correspond- ing to the French a^lne. The span was probably, as with other peoples, divided into 12 ongkice, nails or inches, for ynce, unch, or "inch" (with its doublet "ounce") is ob- viously derived from the Roman term. But the foot also arose at a very early period of English history. Perhaps it may not be superfluous to remark that the foot is not taken from the length of the human foot, any more than the thumb-breadth or a barleycorn was the unit of length, or a grain of some cereal the primitive unit of weight. The foot, like the minor measures, was at first a frac- tion (generally two-thirds) of a cubit, and was so named from its being, very roughly, about the length of a very long human foot. Our foot is not the short Roman foot, nor the long Rhineland foot of Scotland, nor the still longer French foot. It is a foot peculiar to our country, and evolved here scientifically ; it became the standard measure of England, and was divided into 12 parts, called " inches," leaving the synonym " nails " for the 16 digits or nail-breadths which it contained as an extension of the popular span. In course of time it was found desirable, in order to estab-
lish the use of the foot, to adopt a measure
combining it with the span. So the " yard "
or " verge," of 3 feet, divided into 4 spans, or
quarters, became a standard lineal measure.
It had a rival in the ell of 5 spans (45 inches) r
which survived, principally in arithmetical
exercise books, up to about the last century.
Now, how were these two ells, that of 4 spans
and that of 5 spans, divided for cloth measure ?
In Wingate's ' Arithmetick,' 1670, 1 find "That
a Yard, as also an Ell, is usually subdivided
into four Quarters, and each Quarter into
four Nails." Cocker, 1677, says the same in
almost the same words.
So a nail denoted a sixteenth, either of the 4-span yard or of the 5-span ell ; not any distinct length. It had become, like the Indian "anna," the generic term for a six- teenth. But with the gradual disuse of the ell the nail became the synonym of the six- teenth of a yard, and it is still among the standard imperial measures.
Passing to " nail " as a weight, we find a, development of the same idea of its being a sixteenth part. Just as L. uncia, It. oncia, From the twelfth of a span, became the six- teenth of a foot, so Fr. once, from one-twelfth of the duodecimal pound, became one-six- teenth of the livre poids de marc ; and so the Roman ounce, the basis of all our weights and measures (except the royal troy pound, now bappily obsolete), became the sixteenth of our averdepois pound. Thus "ounce," a doublet of unch or ynch, brought the idea of 'nail" into our weights as well as our measures.
Here I tread on ground beset with pitfalls. The importance of the wool trade as a source of revenue to the Plantagenet kings led to nuch confused legislation on our weights. The mess which the statutes of our kings, especially the Plantagenets, made with our weights and measures, creates a difficulty in distinguishing the royal fictive standards
- rom the real standards of commerce. The
greater part of the statutes on the sub- _ect is fiction, often deliberate fiction, out of which the truth is extracted with difficulty. One thing is certain that our weights were on the convenient sexdecimal system from the dram, through the ounce, the pound, the stone, 16 of each unit making one of the next, up to the wey, or " weigh," of 256 pounds, he weight of a coomb, or boll, or half-quarter of wheat ; then 8 weys were equal to a chaldron, the measure of 20 true hundred- weights of wheat. Some of these larger units were halved for convenience ; the wey, or oad, would thus be halved to correspond vith the weight carried on each side of the
