Stang

A northern English and Scots name for the rod, pole or perch.

Stang is Old Norse stong, a pole, and it survives across the north of England and in Scots as a fourth name for the unit already carrying three. Rod, pole, perch and stang are the same sixteen and a half feet; which word a man used told you where he was from rather than what he meant.

In some northern usages the word also attaches to area, as a square stang or a stang of land, and the figures given in the older county glossaries do not agree with one another. The linear sense is the dependable one.

The word’s other life is the custom of riding the stang, in which a neighbour who had beaten his wife or otherwise outraged the parish was hoisted on a pole and paraded through the village to a din of pans and kettles. It was a punishment of noise and shame rather than law, and it persisted in parts of Yorkshire and the north-east into the nineteenth century.