Cuttel

The Shetland ell, used to measure wadmal cloth and to value goods and tax.

The Shetland ell, Norse alin, and the measure by which wadmal cloth was cut — which made it the measure by which tax and goods were valued, since wadmal was what people paid in.

Its length is not recoverable as a single number. A court record of 1598 puts it at three-quarters of a Scottish ell, about twenty-seven and three-quarter inches; early seventeenth-century figures give twenty and twenty-five; a late eighteenth-century one gives twenty-four. All that holds across the sources is that it was shorter than the Scottish ell of about thirty-seven inches, which the name itself suggests — cuttel most likely meaning simply short.

Its value was fixed rather than its length. Six cuttels of wadmal made an ure, and the standard rate is given as sixpence Scots the cuttel, which Earl Robert is said to have raised to two shillings. Whether anyone also lengthened the measuring stick is asserted in some accounts and absent from others.