Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 3.djvu/283

 10'" S. III. MARCH 25, 1905.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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seeing that Walton called his friend the friend of Edmund Spenser, who died on 16 Jan., 1598,9. (See 'D.N.B.,'ix. 437.) Feeling the force of these difficulties, I do not intend here to suggest that the Winchester Fellow was the poet ; but as that suggestion has sometimes been made, the account here offered of his career may be of some benefit to readers who are interested in the question, Who was John Chalkhill, the poet ? H. C.

[A will of Martha Chalkhill, of which probate was granted 8 Dec., 1620, is in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, in the Soanie Register. It supplies information as to Chalkhills, Brownes, &c. An abstract appears in Mr. Lea's volume just issned by the New England Historic Genealogical Society, Boston, Mass.]

THE NAIL AND THE CLOVE (10 th S. iii. 41, 134). I am much obliged to Q. V. for direct- ing my attention to the interesting ' Archi- tectural History of Cambridge.' It seems cer- tain that, for public convenience, a standard foot- measure was fixed in old St. Paul's, as it is now, with other lineal measures, in the floor of the Guildhall and in the wall on the north side of Trafalgar Square. The standards in the latter place have only re- cently been made available for the public ; up to a few months ago they were effectively guarded from view by a row of benches, usually occupied by the foulest class of the unemployed, to whom the square appeared to be given over as a lounge. The removal of these benches to St. Martin's Churchyard has been a great improvement.

As to the number of stones to a sack of wool, this varied, of course, with the size of the sack, and perhaps with the local weight of the stone. Thorold Rogers's figures do not seem to vary much from the statute sack and stone. Under Edward III. the sack must, by statute, " weigh no more than 26 stones, and every stone to weigh 14 Ib." This established the weight of 364 Ib. to the statute sack. Why was this particular weight ordered ? Here we must look back to the history of the stone, the weight of two nails or cloves. Our ancient stone was one of the full sexdecimal series of weights in which 16 Ib. made a stone and 16 stones a wey {= 256 Ib.), but in the maritime countries round the Baltic and extending to the Norse parts of our islands the series was :

The skalpund, the Norse and Scottish pound, equal to 7,620 grains.

The lispund, of 16 skalpunds, still extant in Scotland (see ' O.E.D.' and ' E.D.D.').

The skippund, or ship-pound, of 20 lispunds or 320 skalpunds = 357 Ib. averdepois.

The Plantagenet kings' revenue depending largely on export duties levied on wool, the trade in this produce was regulated by statute, and the unit of weight would natur- ally be fixed at what \vas then the usual unit of freight in Northern ports, the skip- pund. The number of stones to be contained in the sack weighed at the king's tron- balance would be the number making the nearest weight to that of the skippund. Accordingly, when Edward I. ordered that the stone should be 12| Ib., the eighth of the old cental hundredweight, the sack of wool was then to contain 28 stones=350 Ib. When Edward III. raised the hundredweight to 112 Ib. and the stone to 14 Ib, then the sack was to be 26 stones=364 Ib. The one weight was 7 Ib. below that of the skippund, the other 7 Ib. above it.

But there does not seem to have been anything to prevent wool, once the tax on it paid, being exported in sacks of other than statute weight if the circumstances of ship- freight changed. And apparently they did change, and the ton gradually became the cargo-unit, an abstract unit of measurement. Now in Scotland the weight of the sack of wool was also fixed by statute for fiscal reasons, and at the number of stones which gave the nearest weight to that of the skip- pund. As the Scots pound was much heavier than that of England, 24 was the number of stones, which gives a weight equal to 365 English pounds. Yet we see by Andrew Halyburton's 'Ledger' that the sacks of Scottish wool consigned to him in the Nether- lands were of very different weights from that of the statute, the sack being six hundredweight and a few stones or nails over, and the " poke " four to five hundred- weight. Then tnere was the "serplaith," as uncertain in weight as the sack, since the Scottish Customs Roll of 1612 says: "Untill mair perfitt knawledge be haid of the just quantitie of the serplaith, twa tun of fraught to be comptit to the sek and twa sek fraught to the serplaith."

I see in some dictionaries the "sarpler" defined as 10 hundredweight or 80 stone of wool, the serplaith being in some the same weight, in others 20 hundredweight. It is probable that, just as the poke was a small sack, the sarpler was an extra large one, all being trade units of somewhat variable weight. EDWARD NICHOLSON.

Liverpool.

Dr. John Harris, Secretary to the Royal Society, in his ' Lexicon Technicum ; or, an Universal English Dictionary of Arts and Sciences' vol. i. of my copy of the