Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants

by James Vincent

It’s interesting to contrast this method with older traditions of survey and ownership in the British Isles, such as the annual ritual of ‘beating the bounds’. During the beating of the bounds, residents of a town or village would gather together to carry out a foot survey of their community. Priests and elders would lead the expeditions, pointing out geographical features like streams, rocks, and walls that marked the limits of their parish. They would be followed by a gang of children armed with willow sticks, who would beat these objects to place them in their memory or, in earlier centuries, be subjected to hazing themselves to achieve the same end. One account of beating the bounds in Dorset tells how, if the boundary be a stream, one of the boys is tossed into it; if a broad ditch, the boys are offered money to jump over it, in which they, of course, fail and pitch into the mud, where they stick as firmly as if they had been rooted there for the season . . . if a wall, they are to have a race on top of it, when, in trying to pass each other, they fall over on one side, some descending perhaps into the still stygian waters of a ditch, and others thrusting ‘the human face’ divine into a bed of nettles.