Pre-nineteenth-century British systems of weights and measures are notoriously complicated and difficult for the modern observer to understand. As is well known, a profusion of apparently quaint and archaic weights and measures were to be found in use in the market place and farmyard into the eighteenth century and beyond. Thus, there were windles, rods, ells, elns, lagens, firkins, kilderkins, tuns, terses, pottles, poles and perch. One could have a bolt of oziers, a curnock of barley, a firlot of beer, a hobbit of wheat or a poke of wool. This abundance of frequently unrelated measures continues to bequeath problems to the modern historian from the pioneer quantifiers in economic history to the present-day cliometricians. They create major difficulties of comparability which hinder our understanding of prices and quantities. They raise questions as to how transactions were managed in the market place. Further, their survival contrasts strongly with the notion that during the eighteenth century there was a clear and sustained development of a national market in commodities, particularly in grain. Hence, much of the recent writing on the issue places emphasis upon the success of the campaign to standardize weights and measures which came increasingly to fruition at the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In these accounts, metrological reformers, informed by the ‘quantifying spirit’ of the Enlightenment (an impetus to quantify, measure, categorize and order the earth and its products), are portrayed as part and parcel of a process of modernization, driven on the one hand by the force of developing commerce and on the other by the enlightened gentlemen who ran the country.