Orkney and Shetland Weights
Four authorities, four answers, and no standard anywhere.
Origin
Norse weight carried into Scottish rule after 1468, and never afterwards fixed by any authority that could enforce it.
The catch
This is the only table on the site where the sources disagree with each other and with themselves. That disagreement is not a failure of research — it is what the absence of a standard looks like from the outside.
| Unit | Stated relation | Mackenzie, 1750 | Bergen certificate | Also recorded |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Eyrir | 8 to the mark | — | — | Tudor equates it to the troy ounce |
| Mark | The base unit | 18 to 22 oz; 22 called “most just” | 8 oz | No physical standard was ever kept |
| Setting / lispund / span | 24 marks | 30 lb Amsterdam | 12 lb | Also called the pund bysmer |
| Meil | 6 lispunds | 11 st 4 lb Amsterdam | 72 lb | Grain, and the valuing of livestock |
| Lesh pound | 6 settings | — | — | Skene gives 1 stone 2 lb Scots |
| Last | 24 meils | — | — | Tudor’s text gives 2 meils, probably in error |
Read down any column and the arithmetic fails. Twenty-four marks at twenty-two ounces is thirty-three pounds, not the thirty Mackenzie gives; his meil does not come to six of his own settings; and Tudor’s last contradicts the twenty-four meils in Barry and Skene. The reason is documented rather than mysterious. When the islands passed to Scotland in 1468 they kept their own weights, but no Scottish authority ever fixed a standard for them and no standard was maintained. The Bergen certificate was obtained precisely because the islanders had nothing of their own to appeal to — and it gives figures roughly a third of the local ones. Into that vacuum went interest. Robert Stewart, Earl of Orkney, and his son Patrick are both blamed in the record for enlarging the weights by which tenants paid, and when the question finally reached a court, it was decided for the landlord on the ground of prescription: long use, rather than correctness. The instruments made it easy. A bismar is a wooden beam with a sliding balance point, and a pundlar is the same idea at seven feet; lengthening either changes what every graduation means, and nothing about the weight itself will show it. One account gives the minimum error as ten ounces per mark on the bismar and eight pounds per setting on the pundlar, in honest hands. Values in the Mackenzie column are Amsterdam pounds, which is itself worth noting: a Scottish island weighing its butter against a Dutch standard, because there was no useful British one to hand.