The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: a Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century

by Ian Mortimer

This sounds complicated but it could be worse. Devon has its own peculiar weights and measures system, so any merchant doing business there needs to keep his wits about him. The ‘rod’ measures eighteen feet, not sixteen-and-a-half, so an acre measures 5,760 square yards, not 4,840. There are 16lbs to the stone (not fourteen), when measuring cheese or butter. The Devon pound weighs 18oz (not sixteen). A hundredweight is not 112lbs as elsewhere in England but 120lbs. There are ten gallons in a Devon bushel, not the more usual eight. In a later century a traveller remarks that a man from the Midlands or the north of England ‘might travel through all the countries of Europe and not find practices more foreign to his own than those of Devon’.8

devon units of measure