According to "How heavy, How Much and How long" by Colin R Chapman a
lot of old measurements were based parts of the (male!) human body.
A foot is 12 inches or 16 digits. A digit is the width of a man's
middle finger at the base of the nail and an inch the width of his
thumb at the base of the nail. A yard was the distance measured by
King Henry I between the tip of his nose and the tip of his middle
finger with his arm outstretched.
The same book states that an English ell is 45 inches whilst a French
ell is 54 inches.
Brenda
On 29 Jul 2007, at 04:36, Tamara P Duvall wrote:
On Jul 28, 2007, at 17:52, bevw wrote:
An ell is about 45 inches. Does that help?
It is an English measure. Perhaps there is a French measure which the
wooden
piece would represent.
On 7/28/07, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Assuming it has anything to do with lace at all, could it be the
measuring
device for an "ell" of lace, which was the increment in which lace
was
sold.
Some of the old measuring devices/terminology are thought-provoking.
Take, for example, a "foot"... When did it become 12 inches (ca 20cm)?
My foot is nowhere near that, though my husband's closer. In pre WWI
Poland, all textiles used to be sold by "an elbow" (lokiec) -- a
measure which was based on the length of an arm between the elbow and
the wrist. I never even knew how much that was but (have only met the
term in books), checking on the Polish version of Wikipedia, I found
that it varied -- from century to century and from region to region.
The shortest (and most common <g>) was 50.6cm (just short of 20
inches) and the longest was 77.9cm (30.5 inches).
So, I expect, the French would have had some such measure too, before
the French Revolution (which brought us the metric system and the
lovely decimals).
--
Tamara P Duvall http://t-n-lace.net/
Lexington, Virginia, USA (Formerly of Warsaw, Poland)
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Brenda in Allhallows, Kent
http://paternoster.orpheusweb.co.uk/index.html
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