Down Under Quilts - Issue 134, 2009

or rule of eye?

Rule of thumb

As a communal _project _{made on} _board _the }
ship Rajah
from England
to Australia
in 1841, it is
a
tour de
force.

It is interesting to consider
what measuring tools
and which methods were
used in the early days
of patchworking,
Carolyn Ferguson shares
her thoughts.

The earliest units of lineal measure used parts of the body: the finger, the thumb, the nail, the digit, the palm, the hand, the forearm or cubit, the foot, the span, the girdle and the stride. A fathom was the width of the body, that is, the length between the outstretched arms. Measures were identified by name. Before the advent of compulsory education in England in 1870, most people would have had little concept of written number. Roman numerals were in use until the Middle Ages, but were difficult to use arithmetically. The earliest representation in a sampler of our familiar ‘1, 2, 3’ number system was not until 1651 and there was no formal standardisation of linear measurement in England until the middle of the 19th century.

Though metres and centimetres are gaining ground, many quilters today still use the yard and the inch. In 1324, it was decreed that ‘three barleycorns, round and dry, shall make an inch’, meaning one-twelfth part,

and that ‘twelve inches shall make a foot’. A lady’s shortest thumb joint is also measured as an inch, while the knuckle to the tip of the longest finger (one finger) was used to measure ¹/8th or half a quarter of a yard (H/Q), or two nails. A man’s foot is a foot long. A lady’s arm is one yard long, and milady’s reach from the tip of her nose to her farthest reach is equally a yard. Another definition states that the cloth yard of the Middle Ages was the length of a battle or hunting arrow. A statute of Edward IV, circa 1450, enacted that the measure of cloth should contain to every yard one inch containing the measure of a man’s thumb, or 37 inches. Goods for export were measured by the short stitch, or 35 inches. The home market on the other hand, used the English long stitch or long measure, or long measure of three feet or 36 inches, which became the standard definition of a yard by the mid 18th century.

A copy book from a pupil at the Quaker Ackworth School in Yorkshire dated 1784 gives the following units of measure, together with a series of calculations, see page 77.

One Nail, taken from the Old English word nagel or naegel, is equivalent to 2¹/4in or ¹/16th of a yard. Originally, the Ell was the length of the forearm or the ulna, and equated to either 18, 20¹/2in or 24in. The standardisation of the English Ell to 45 inches seemed to have been imported from France under the Tudors. Variations in measurement from country to country meant that the English merchant needed to be careful when he bought fabrics and laces from the continent.