Ure / Eyrir

An ounce of silver, used as money of account across the Norse north and in the Northern Isles.

Old Norse eyrir, an ounce of silver, and like the English mark it is money of account rather than a coin. Nobody in Shetland handed over an ounce of silver; the ure was the figure a debt was stated in, and something else changed hands.

What changed hands was cloth. Six cuttels of wadmal made an ure, so a rent of so many ures was paid in so many lengths of homespun — and the whole system closes neatly: the urisland is land assessed to render one ounce of silver, the tenant has no silver, so he pays in wadmal, which is measured in cuttels. Land valued in ounces, paid in cloth, counted by the yard. The rate is not unanimous, and Gifford gives six cuttels to a shilling where Balfour gives them to an ure.

It was also a weight, eight to the mark, and that produces a quiet reconciliation. If the ure is the troy ounce, as one account has it, a mark of eight ures is a mark of eight ounces — which is exactly the figure the islanders obtained from Bergen, against the eighteen to twenty-two that local practice had reached by the eighteenth century. The arithmetic suggests the Norse original had simply been inflated at home, though no source states it outright.

The word survives in plain sight. An ounceland is the land of an ure.