Exchequer Standards

The Exchequer Standards may refer to the set of official English standards for weights and measures created by Queen Elizabeth I (English units), and in effect from 1588 to 1826, when the Imperial Units system took effect, or to the whole range of English unit standards maintained by the Court of the Exchequer from the 1200s, or to the physical reference standards physically kept at the Exchequer and used as the legal reference until the such responsibility was transferred in the 1860s, after the Imperial system had been established.

The Exchequer standards made in the reign of Queen Elizabeth were not authorized by any statute. The standards were ordered by the royal authority, as appears from a roll of Michaelas terms in the 29th Elizbeth, preserved in the Queen's Remembrancer's Office, and containing the royal proclamation.

The Exchequer Standards were so called because their repository had always been the Court of the King's Exchequer.

Notably, Elizabeth I's redefinition of these standards instituted the English Doubling System, whereby each larger liquid measure equals exactly two of the next-smaller measure.

The Great Charter of 1225 was the first legislative act in the English statutes at large, and is a repetition of the Magna Charta by Henry III in 1300, although it is officially listed as act 9 Henry III.

With respect to the Magna Charta requiring that there be one unified measure of volume, and another for length, thus unifying disparate measurement systems used to trade each different commodity, there is an argument made that this supposition is in error, and that it actually required these remain separately defined measures, but each be consistent across the kingdom:

In several of the subsequent confirmations of this charter, which, for successive ages, attest at once how apt it was to be forgotten by power, and how present it always was to the memory of the people, the real meaning of this 25th chapter appears to have been misunderstood. It has been supposed to have prescribed the uniformity of identity, and not the uniformity of proportion; that, by enjoining one measure of wine, and one measure of ale, and one measure of corn, its intention was, that all these measures should be the same; that there should be only one unit measure of capacity for liquid and dry substance, and one unit of weights.

But this neither was, nor could be, the meaning of the statute. Had it been the intention of the legislator, he would have said, there shall be one and the same measure for wine, corn, and ale; and the reference to the London quarter could not have been made, for neither wine nor ale were ever measured by the quarter, and, instead of saying "it shall be of weights as it is of measures," it would have said there shall be but one set of weights for whatever is to be weighed.

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