Of the English span-ells the Yard alone remains. The 5-span Ell, maintained by the statute authority which prescribed the breadth of cloth, lived only as a royal measure and, like the royal pound, was gradually superseded by the more popular measure. The ell was obsolete nearly a century before the royal pound silently disappeared. It seems, however, to have survived in Wales for a long time.
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Only a sketch of these can be given, for in some countries so various are the local standards that each petty state, each district sometimes, would require a long study.
The Roman foot = 11·67 inches. This is, or was, also used in Oldenburg and in some parts of Holland.
The Rhineland foot = 12·356 inches, divided into 12 Tomme (thumbs), 12 feet = 1 rode (rod).
2. The Hanoverian foot = 11·5 inches more or less, used in Hanover, Pomerania, part of Holland and Belgium, Bavaria, Mecklenburg, and Geneva.
3. The Hanseatic foot, 11·32 inches more or less, used in Lubeck, Bremen (11·39), Hamburg (11·276), Dantzig, also in Hesse, Saxe-Coburg, and Poland.
The length of 11·32 inches points to the probability of the Hanseatic foot being a reduced Rhineland foot, 11/12 of 12·356 inches = 11·3264 inches. There are several instances of the popular objection to a long foot and of the artifice which reduces it to a more convenient length by taking 11 inches of the government standard, and making from them a foot of 12 short inches.
4. The Amsterdam foot = 11·146 inches, also used in the Dutch parts of New England. This foot is divided into 11 inches, an evident instance of a reduced foot, unconcealed by any division into 12 new inches. The practice of making a reduced foot stands revealed, and is confirmed by the Amsterdam rod (roede) being 13 of these reduced feet, evidently to make up in land-measure for the reduction in the foot in the home and in the workshop. This compensation is of the same kind as that now used in English agricultural weights where, to compensate for the statute reduction of the ancient 16 lb. stone, of which 16 made a wey or load of 256 lb., the custom arose of taking 18 statute-stones of 14 lb. to make a load of 252 lb. approximately the same as the old load.