For years, Royal Mail couriers with particularly heavy loads had been using bars engraved with the French-English match-pair parcelle-parcel. Both French and English had once used parcel to refer to pieces of land that made up an estate, but when it evolved to imply an item of business in both, it retained its connotation of small fragmentariness in French, whereas in English it simply meant a package. Fixing this bar to the postal carriage made the parcels seem a fraction of their true weight.
