Lispund / Setting

Twenty-four marks, the working unit of the Orkney and Shetland butter trade and of rent in kind.

Twenty-four marks, and the top of a bismar’s scale: the instrument was graduated from one to twenty-four, so a lispund was simply a full beam. The same quantity is also called a setting, a span, or a pund bysmer, depending on the island and the century.

It mattered because the Northern Isles paid in kind. Skat — the Norse land tax — and rent were rendered in butter, oil and cloth rather than coin, and butter was rendered by the lispund. A tenant’s annual obligation was a number of lispunds, which meant the size of the lispund was the size of his rent.

Its modern weight cannot be stated honestly as one figure, because the mark it rests on was never fixed. Twenty-four marks is somewhere near thirty-three pounds at the larger estimate and twelve at the Bergen figure, and the sources do not agree.

Scott has a factor announce in The Pirate that he means to change the bismars and the lispunds — a threat his readers understood at once.