The ell, the foot and the rod — when every town measured its own way

Picture a cloth merchant in the seventeenth century, hauling a bale of linen from Gdańsk through Toruń and Warsaw to Kraków. In each of those cities the same cloth seems to "shrink" or "grow" — because the Gdańsk ell was a different length from the Chełmno one, and the Kraków ell different again. Whoever measured by someone else’s standard was easily cheated. No wonder the master standards — iron rods and ells — were set into the walls of town halls, so that anyone could check whether they were being swindled.

To this day, the wall of the Chełmno town hall bears an iron rod inscribed Culmer Ruthe — the Chełmno rod, the standard by which towns founded under Chełmno law were laid out (the renewed 1251 charter became the basis for chartering more than two hundred towns, among them Warsaw, Gdańsk and Toruń). A technical curiosity: when a copy of it was made in 2010, the measurement came out at 4.326 m at the bottom and 4.330 m at the top — a few millimetres the standard had "picked up" over time from the weather and an unknown metal alloy. Even the standards were not entirely trustworthy.

The myth: "every king measured from his own body"

First, let’s dispose of a stubborn legend. The tale that every ruler set his measures by the proportions of his own body is chiefly a Western-European one. The most famous version is the English story of Henry I, who supposedly fixed the yard as the distance from the tip of his nose to the end of his outstretched finger. The trouble is that the only source mention — in William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum Anglorum (1125) — speaks only of "the length of the king’s arm" and says nothing about a nose; that vivid detail was added more than a century later.

In the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth the problem was not a ruler’s whim but regional variation and failed attempts at unification. The Crown (Kraków) ell was one thing; the Chełmno, Gdańsk, Lithuanian and Warsaw ells were others. Successive laws tried to bring order: the Sejm constitution of 1565 imposed the Kraków ell (called the Crown ell) across the whole Crown and ordered standards to be kept in town halls; the acts of 1569, 1588 and 1633 regulated local measures; finally the convocation Sejm of 1764 fixed a so-called general (Warsaw) measure, with separate measures for Lithuania in 1766. Even so, full unification failed — local units stubbornly lived on.

The ell — from Kraków to Vilnius

The ell (łokieć) referred to the length of the arm from the elbow joint to the tip of the middle finger, and was usually divided into 2 feet or 24 inches. In Poland its length fell somewhere between about 57 and 65 cm, depending on the region and the era.

Two patterns stand out. First, the Kraków ell shrank over the centuries — from nearly 65 cm in the Middle Ages to about 57–59 cm in the early-modern era. Second, the differences were often small and therefore treacherous: the Hamburg ell was 57.3 cm and the Lübeck one 57.7 cm, even though the two cities lie only about 68 km apart. A mistake — or a fraud — was easy.

The values in the historical Polish units converter are based on the last, New Polish variant of 1819 (ell = 57.6 cm), because it was the first system in Polish lands to tie the old names to the metre by a clean fraction — which is exactly what makes them precisely convertible today.

From the inch to the staje — the ladder of old lengths

The ell did not stand alone. It was the middle rung of an orderly ladder in which each unit was a multiple of its neighbour. In the New Polish system it looked like this:

The foot is simply half an ell; the Old Polish foot (before 1819) was about 29.78 cm, the New Polish one exactly 28.8 cm. The fathom — the span of outstretched arms — was three ells. The rod (7.5 ells) was the surveyor’s tool: that same 4.32 m rod was used to lay out fields, and its square became the basis for measures of area.

Above the rod begins a measure that gave nightmares to anyone trying to standardise it. The staje (properly stajanie) meant both a length and an area, and was exceptionally variable. As a farming measure it was the length of the furrow an ox ploughed without turning — the equivalent of the English furlong. The statute staje was 84 ells; the Old Polish one was usually about 134 m, and the New Polish one already about 1067 m. Why the range? Because the measure grew out of labour — out of how much you could actually plough or ride, which depended on the soil, the team and the district. According to Zygmunt Gloger, the "equal" mile was divided into 32 staje and the "great" mile into 40 — and the miles themselves were not uniform either.

The "softness" of the old standards shows best in the inch. As late as the 1764 reform it was defined as the length of twelve barley grains laid in a row. As Edward Massalski noted in 1834, the 1565 constitution adopted the Kraków ell, "but the size of the inch was not precisely fixed; it was measured with twelve barley grains." Only the ell kept in the Warsaw magistrate’s office, adopted as the standard in 1764, turned out to equal 0.595539 m — "and from then until 1796 this ell was the official and used measure throughout Poland."

Not only length

The chaos did not stop at ells. Grain, peas and flour were not weighed but poured into vessels — and the dry measure, the korzec (a bushel-like unit), was even more local than length: it is estimated that in the Middle Ages some 300 different korzec measures were in use across Polish lands. The Kraków korzec held about 43.7 litres, the Warsaw one (from 1764) about 120.6 — a nearly threefold difference under one name. Land was the same: the morga meant the area one team could plough by noon, and depending on the partition it ranged from about 0.26 to 0.71 hectare. That story — the measures of area and how much a misread morga can really cost — we tell separately in Morga, acre, hectare.

Measure as an instrument of power

The greatest Polish scholar of the subject, the historian Witold Kula, devoted an entire chapter of his book Measures and Men (1970) to the thesis that old measures were an attribute of power — and a medium of class struggle in the countryside.

The mechanism was concrete. Grain was poured into an open vessel, and everything depended on how you poured it. A "struck" measure was levelled at the rim with a special stick — a strickle. A "heaped" measure had a mound on top. Add to that the height from which the grain was poured: from shoulder height it packed denser than from knee height. A lord collecting dues gladly took a heaped measure; he lent peasants struck grain and demanded it back heaped — that is, "with interest."

A moving trace of one such dispute survives. In the 1789 inspection of the Kraków voivodeship, peasants from the village of Zederman complained that, under a decree, the castle was supposed to take its levy "by the struck royal korzec," but was taking it "heaped" — and on top of that had confiscated the shared korzec, refusing to return it, thereby depriving the village of any way to check which measure was correct. As Kula sums it up: "everything conspired to breed conflict over measures."

How the metre won out over chaos

The idea of a universal measure, "unchanging and everlasting," appeared as early as the seventeenth century — and, interestingly, one of its first voices spoke in Vilnius, where Tito Livio Burattini, settled in the Commonwealth, proposed a metro cattolico in 1675. That part of the story — from Burattini’s pendulum to the French survey of the meridian — we tell in The history of the metre. For Polish lands the crucial thing is what came afterwards: metrication became dramatically entangled with the partitions, and each occupying power imposed its own system.

• In the Kingdom of Poland a reform driven partly by Stanisław Staszic (a decree of 13 June 1818, in force from 1 January 1819) introduced the New Polish system, based on the Warsaw ell but already tied to the metre (ell = 57.6 cm). From 1849 it was pushed aside by Russian measures.
• In the Prussian partition the metric system came earliest — from 1868 (in common use from about 1872).
• In the Austrian partition — by a law of 1871, in force from 1876.
• In the Russian partition metric measures were only permitted optionally, from 1899; Russia itself went metric in 1918.

Full unification came with independence. The decree on measures of 8 February 1919, signed by the Chief of State Józef Piłsudski, was among the first legal acts of the reborn Republic — it introduced the metric system and established the Central Office of Measures (formally from 1 April 1919, from 1922 headquartered on Elektoralna Street in Warsaw). Its first director, Dr. Eng. Zdzisław Rauszer, held that "measures, on a par with the alphabet, are the foundation of every culture." In 1925 Poland acceded to the Metre Convention. The old garniec and korzec measures took years yet to vanish from markets — inspectors recorded their use in trade long after they had been legally banned.

An idiom that survived

The old measures left us more than a converter. They also left the phrase "to measure someone (something) by one’s own measure" — recorded in dictionaries as "to judge by oneself, to assess from one’s own point of view," with a Biblical pedigree ("with the measure you use, it will be measured to you"). It is one of many sayings that preserved the old weight of measuring: "a good measure is better than faith," "measure is needed in everything."

The takeaway: a revolution you can’t see

When we buy a metre of cable today, we don’t wonder whether the seller measures "the Kraków way" or "the Gdańsk way." It is a gain so deep it has become invisible. Yet for centuries a uniform measure was a dream — and an instrument of justice. As long as a lord could take his dues by a heaped measure and repay by a struck one; as long as the same ell meant something different beyond every town gate — the measure was a weapon. Unifying measures was therefore more than a technical convenience: it was a precondition of trust in trade and of basic honesty between people. The revolutionary slogan "one king, one law, one weight, one measure" turned out to be one of the foundations of the modern world. The metre won not because it was French, but because it was one.

Further reading

• Witold Kula, Measures and Men (Polish orig. Miary i ludzie, 1970) — the classic on the social and political role of measures.
• Zygmunt Gloger, Encyklopedia staropolska (Warsaw, 1900–1903) — entries on the ell, the staje and the miles.
• Encyklopedia historii gospodarczej Polski do 1945 roku, vols. 1–2 (Wiedza Powszechna, Warsaw, 1981).
• Central Office of Measures (GUM), Vademecum. Units of Measure (2022) and the bulletin Metrologia i Probiernictwo — old standards and the Henry I yard myth.