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The term, yard derives from the Old English gerd, gyrd etc., which was used for branches, staves and measuring rods. [5] It is first attested in the late 7th century laws of Ine of Wessex, [6] where the "yard of land" mentioned [6] is the yardland, an old English unit of tax assessment equal to 1 ⁄ 4 hide.
Detail of a cubit rod in the Museo Egizio of Turin The earliest recorded systems of weights and measures originate in the 3rd or 4th millennium BC. Even the very earliest civilizations needed measurement for purposes of agriculture, construction and trade. Early standard units might only have applied to a single community or small region, with every area developing its own standards for ...
The Composition of Yards and Perches (Latin: Compositio Ulnarum et Perticarum) or the Statute of Ells and Perches was a medieval English statute defining the length of the barleycorn, inch, foot, yard, and perch, as well as the area of the acre. Its date has been estimated at 1266–1303. [1]
The imperial and US customary systems of measurement use the SI for their formal definitions, the yard being defined as 0.9144 metres exactly, the pound avoirdupois as 0.453 592 37 kilograms exactly while both systems of measure share the definition of the second.
The rod is useful as a unit of length because integer multiples of it can form one acre of square measure (area). The 'perfect acre' [2] is a rectangular area of 43,560 square feet, bounded by sides 660 feet (a furlong) long and 66 feet (a chain) wide (220 yards by 22 yards) or, equivalently, 40 rods by 4 rods. An acre is therefore 160 square ...
The Compositio redefined the yard, foot, inch, and barleycorn to 10 ⁄ 11 of their previous value. [dubious – discuss] However, it retained the Anglo-Saxon rod of 15 x 11 ⁄ 10 feet (5.03 metres) and the acre of 4 × 40 square rods. Thus, the rod went from 5 old yards to 5 + 1 ⁄ 2 new yards, or 15 old feet to 16 + 1 ⁄ 2 new feet. The ...
perch, used variously to measure length or area; acre and acre's breadth; furlong; mile; The best-attested of these is the perch, which varied in length from 10 to 25 feet, with the most common value (16 1 ⁄ 2 feet or 5.03 m) remaining in use until the twentieth century. [1] Later development of the English system continued in 1215 in the ...
The international yard and pound agreement of July 1959 defined the length of the international yard in the United States and countries of the Commonwealth of Nations as exactly 0.9144 meters. Consequently, since a foot is one third of a yard, the international foot is defined to be equal to exactly 0.3048 meters.