The Scottish stone was equal to 16 Scottish pounds (17 lb 8 oz avoirdupois or 7.936 kg). The Oxford English Dictionary also lists: Commodity Smithfield market continued to use the 8 lb stone for meat until shortly before the Second World War. Thus, if the animal's carcass accounted for 8⁄ 14 of the animal's weight, the butcher could return the dressed carcasses to the animal's owner stone for stone, keeping the offal, blood and hide as his due for slaughtering and dressing the animal. Live animals were weighed in stones of 14 lb but, once slaughtered, their carcasses were weighed in stones of 8 lb. In England, merchants traditionally sold potatoes in half-stone increments of 7 pounds. A nineteenth-century slide rule for estimating cattle carcass weights, calibrated in stones of 20, 17 + 1⁄ 2, 8 and 14 pounds In 1350 Edward III issued a new statute defining the stone weight, to be used for wool and 'other Merchandizes', at 14 pounds, reaffirmed by Henry VII in 1495. used for lead and the London stone of 12 + 1⁄ 2 lb. used for beeswax, sugar, pepper, alum, cumin, almonds, cinnamon, and nutmegs stones of 12 lb. 1300, describes stones of 5 merchants' pounds used for glass stones of 8 lb. The Assize of Weights and Measures, a statute of uncertain date from c. The English stone under law varied by commodity and in practice varied according to local standards. The value of the stone and associated units of measure that were legalised for purposes of trade were clarified by the Weights and Measures Act 1835 as follows: Equivalent James Britten, in 1880 for example, catalogued a number of different values of the stone in various British towns and cities, ranging from 4 lb to 26 lb. The Act of 1835 permitted using a stone of 14 pounds for trade but other values remained in use. Ten years later, a stone still varied from 5 pounds (glass) to 8 pounds (meat and fish) to 14 pounds (wool and 'horseman's weight'). It revoked the provision that bales of wool should be made up of 20 stones, each of 14 pounds, but made no provision for the continued use of the stone. The Weights and Measures Act of 1824, which applied to all of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, consolidated the weights and measures legislation of several centuries into a single document. A stone of beef, in London, is the quantity of eight pounds in Hertfordshire, twelve pounds in Scotland sixteen pounds. STONE also denotes a certain quantity or weight of some commodities. The 1772 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica defined the stone: Such weights varied in quality: the Yale Medical Library holds 10 and 50-pound examples of polished serpentine, while a 40-pound example at the Eschborn Museum is made of sandstone. There was no standardised 'stone' in the ancient Jewish world, but in Roman times stone weights were crafted to multiples of the Roman pound. The Biblical law against the carrying of 'diverse weights, a large and a small' is more literally translated as 'you shall not carry a stone and a stone ( אבן ואבן), a large and a small'.

The name 'stone' derives from the use of stones for weights, a practice that dates back into antiquity. 9,950g The Eschborn Museum's 2nd-century stone weight of 40 Roman pounds (c. 13 kg), beside an ID-1-sized card for scale With the advent of metrication, Europe's various 'stones' were superseded by or adapted to the kilogram from the mid-19th century on.Īntiquity Stone weight with Darius the Great–era tri-lingual inscription.

The stone continues in customary use in the United Kingdom for body weight.Įngland and other Germanic-speaking countries of Northern Europe formerly used various standardised 'stones' for trade, with their values ranging from about 5 to 40 local pounds (roughly 3 to 15 kg) depending on the location and objects weighed. The stone or stone weight (abbreviation: st.) is an English and British imperial unit of mass equal to 14 pounds (6.35 kg). A 16th-century bronze 1 stone weight emblazoned with the English coat of arms

Kg to lbs to stone