Watching cricket, I was startled to find that no one here knew that a wicket length is one chain which is the width of the feudal farm strip  allocation. And no one here was greatly interested in this knowledge because they had no idea about the strip system. This shows how the past is gently being  buried. However, there must be other measures that I can illuminate for them. Res Historians must know quite a few that I can use..... 

NB:. If I am carried out with the virus please get someone to also check a knife in my back for being boring.... or not  Even road death goes down as virus in my area because it saves on post mortems.

Well an inch, which is still known in France as un pouce ie a thumb, approximates in length to the last section of a human thumb, while the foot, which historically was a part of Greek, Roman, Chinese, French, and English systems of measurement, of course corresponded to a largish human foot (often the local ruler's) and was generally, but not always, subdivided into 12 or 16 inches/digits.

The Roman mile was a thousand paces as measured by every other step, hence a mile was the total distance of the left foot hitting the ground 1,000 times (a convenient way for a marching army to estimate the distance they had travelled). The mile was indirectly standardised by Agrippa's establishment of a standard Roman foot (Agrippa's own) in 29 BC, and the definition of a pace as 5 feet. An Imperial Roman mile thus denoted 5,000 Roman feet.

Talking area: an acre was originally defined in the middle ages as the area of land that could be ploughed in one day by a yoke of oxen. Meanwhile a hide was originally intended to represent the amount of land sufficient to support a household. Although often taken to be 120 acres, a hide was not actually an exact measure of area because on poorer land a hide would need to be be larger than on richer land to support an equal family. A hide was really a measure of land value for tax assessment, but was also used as the basis for obligations such as food-rent (feorm), manpower for the army (fyrd), and for the maintenance and repair of bridges and fortifications.

We lost something when we went metric. I'm thinking of the old terms used in traditional folk ballads and in the lyrics of other songs that have been the soundtrack to our lives. Somehow Scarborough Fair wouldn't have the same haunting quality if one of the exhortations had been: "Tell her to buy me a hectare of land"...

And one of the late David Bowie's favourite songs was Inchworm sung by Danny Kaye. Centimetreworm hasn't the same appeal somehow...

PORTIA

Therefore prepare thee to cut off the flesh.
Shed thou no blood, nor cut thou less nor more
But just 453.592 grams of flesh. If thou takest more
Or less than 453.592 grams, be it but so much
As makes it light or heavy in the substance
Or the division of the twentieth part
Of one poor scruple—nay, if the scale do turn
But in the estimation of a hair,
Thou diest and all thy goods are confiscate.

The metre was originally defined in 1791 by the French Academy of Sciences to be one ten-millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the Equator, in a straight line running through Paris. In 1799, after the length of that quadrant had been surveyed and so the physical length of a metre had been determined, the new system was launched in France. A secondary measure based on the metre and still in common use in France, is the stère, which was intended as a metric analogue to the English cord as in an amount of cordwood ie stacked cut logs (the name cord probably comes from the use of an encircling  cord or string to measure it). Hence a stère is the quantity of stacked firewood or other cut wood, that fits into a cubic metre. I still sometimes buy cut logs for firewood and they are priced by the stère, such that a stère of oak or beech is usually more expensive than a stère of birch or chestnut (mostly because of the higher calorific value and better burning properties).

A useless piece of information is that there are 176 ells in a furlong

A Roman solution to a weights and standards issue (taken very seriously indeed given the tax revenues involved) has ended up dictating shoe sizes in the UK and Ireland to this day.

Diocletian, as part of his massive streamlining of the Roman economy, did away with the huge bureaucracy that hitherto had included wandering inspectors equipped with regulation weights and measuring cords who descended on markets unannounced to make sure that everything above board was literally above board. The emperor realised that new "imperial" measurements could be decreed under his own imprimatur (making cheating an act of treason and punishable by death), and with this huge threat hanging over miscreants the standards could then be based on items more generally to hand in most of the empire's market places and which also rather usefully tended to come in naturally uniform shapes and weights.

His adoption of the humble barleycorn was supposedly based on an already long-standing Persian practise, and Diocletian's law even went so far as to stipulate that the corn had to be no less than six weeks old, this requirement also having to be vocally agreed between the trading partners before a transaction could continue. "Sex Septimana", later reduced just to "Septa", became the opening greeting between purchaser and seller, a practise that also long outlived the empire and persisted in markets as recently as the 20th century where it was noticed and commented upon by Gertrude Bell who found it in use from Greece to the Lebanon. Once uttered it signalled commitment to a purchase, and in some societies could even be used as evidence in litigation following a failed transaction where its absence or witnessed utterance carried heavy legal implications for whoever had broken the rules.

The mature barleycorn had two great advantages as a makeshift imperial measurement standard - not only its size but its weight is remarkably uniform. For this reason it also made it into Diocletian's system as the "frumentum", a weight that carried on after the empire ended and simply translated into the local tongue, in England ending up therefore as the "grain". In the reign of Edward I it was this measurement that the king decreed should become the royal approved standard, basically bringing England into line with the French standard as practised in the Troyes market, a place dependent on English trade at the time with which local traders were therefore familiar (hence Troy weight).

However this conflicted with an already established "rule of thumb" weight assessment, especially for precious metals and spices where slight variations might prove expensive to either trading party, in which wheat ears were already doing the job. Edward therefore sanctioned use of a second standard, also imported from France, Avoirdupois (goods of weight), in which the "grain" retained its role as a standard but where different multiples of which would constitute larger weight denominations for some products, in particular wool.

So, in a system that was rapidly becoming more and diverse and confusing (a "pound" now had three royal-approved meanings) but which still had to be adaptable enough that it could be used in any market place the humble barleycorn suddenly took centre stage as the one dependable basis on which the whole complicated mess (and the customers) could depend. And not just for weight - Edward had restated Diocletian's ancient decree that three barleycorns' width constituted one inch, so everyone from goldsmiths to fabric purchasers did well to carry a few ears of corn with them to the market place, whether buying by the pound or the foot.

The guys who loved the barleycorn the most however were those who sold products in which even slight variations of length were important, not just to avoid unnecessary waste but to produce well-fitting personal items such as trousers, blouses and - of course - shoes. Customers, who might be ambivalent about describing body sizes when ordering stuff from tailors, were however very choosy indeed when ordering their shoes. Even one barleycorn out in one's assessment might lead to corns of another type entirely after all.

So, even today, and long after they ceased being aware that it is the humble barleycorn they are actually citing, UK and Irish customers will to this day quote their foot size in numbers of the grain. Somewhere there is an ethereal imperial cabbage patch where the shade of a very contented Diocletian looks on with approval at every purchase of a pair of the latest Nike runners ...

In a very similar manner to barleycorns being so uniform in size and weight and hence being adopted as a universal measure ... ripe carob seeds also generally all have a very uniform weight, both within the pod but also from tree to tree and even from widely differing locations. This feature seems to have led to them also once being used as an international standard measure of weight around the Mediterranean. Most importantly the use of carob seeds provided a convenient and readily verifiable standard weight which buyers and sellers in local markets all around the ancient world could use without having to refer back to any of the national 'standard' reference weights held in Rome, Athens, Alexandria, Damascus, Palmyra or wherever. For example a Roman solidus gold coin was specified as containing ​1⁄72 of a libra (a Roman pound) of pure gold and also to be equal to the mass of 24 siliquae, where each siliqua conveniently weighed roughly the same as a single carob seed.

The concept of a carob seed as a measure of weight persists today in the term 'carat' as a measure of fineness of gold, such that 24 carat gold is 100% purity, 12 carat is 50% purity, 9 carat is 37.5% purity etc. Note however that while a roman gold solidus coin might have weighed the same as 24 carob seeds/siliquae, it would bevertheless have also contained a few percent of silver and copper and so was in reality less than 24 carat gold. Originally the silver and copper were deliberately added to harden the alloy for practical coinage purposes, but over time the amounts added increased (ie the gold content and carat decreased) as successive emperors realised they could get away with debasing the coinage by adding more and more cheap copper and pocketing the gold it replaced (although they did need to add some moderately-expensive silver along with the copper, otherwise the 'gold' coinage started to look a suspiciously dull-red or even greenish-brown colour). For jewellers a carat remains simply a unit of a gemstone's mass, now defined as equal to 0.2g which is still about the weight of a typical dry carob seed.

The word carat derives from the Arabic qīrāṭ, قيراط , meaning "fruit of the carob tree", which in turn originated from the Greek kerátion (κεράτιον) again referring to the tree's fruit, although it literally means "small horn", presumably reflecting the seed pod's toughness and long, slightly-curved, pointed shape. That said, I rather doubt that carob seeds were ever actually used to weigh precious metals or gemstones because, although remarkably uniform in weight, the variations between seeds would still be too much to risk for such valuable commodities. However carob seeds, like barleycorns, may well have served as convenient measures for selling small quantities of ground spices, dyes and cosmetic or medicinal preparations.

Fascinating stuff , thank you  and what of the measurement of time - or perhaps what I  would like to know is how the passage of time was named and, for instance appointment times understood,  How did the crowd know what time the killing Christians and other arena events  would take place? The passage of hours was worked out in ancient times but how referred to?  Church bells for monastic services would have been useful later .... how was time marked by monks? Water clocks? Marked candles? Not well expressed all of that......but how in any given time before clocks and watches would one say and be understood saying, "Right, se yer at half past ten , then."

Fascinating stuff , thank you  and what of the measurement of time - or perhaps what I  would like to know is how the passage of time was named and, for instance appointment times understood,  How did the crowd know what time the killing Christians and other arena events  would take place? The passage of hours was worked out in ancient times but how referred to?  Church bells for monastic services would have been useful later .... how was time marked by monks? Water clocks? Marked candles? Not well expressed all of that......but how in any given time before clocks and watches would one say and be understood saying, "Right, se yer at half past ten , then."

The current sexagesimal (base 60) system of time measurement (which is of course intimately linked to the base 60 system for angular measurement in astronomy) dates to at least 2000 BC from the Sumerians who, like the Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks and Romans, all noted the passage of time principally by reference to sundials in one form or another. The English term hour, is from the Anglo-Norman houre, a development of the Old French ure, which ultimately derived from the Latin hora and Greek ὥρα. (Old English had a cognate word, hṓrā, but this was originally a much vaguer term meaning any span of time, sometimes including seasons and even years). The ancient Greek and Roman hora was a single fraction of the day, which they divided into 12 daylight hours (sunrise to sunset) and 12 night hours (sunset to sunrise), accordingly the actual length of a day-hour and a night-hour varied throughout the year.

The terms minute and second come into use in their modern sense with the development of more precise clocks in about the 16th century. The minute, or prime minute, meant the first division of the hour (ie. an hour divided by 60), while the second, short for secunda pars minuta "second diminished part" was the result of the second division of the hour (ie. an hour divided twice by 60 - so divided by 60 x 60) from the Latin secundus, meaning "following, or next in order". But I think that originally the 'prime minute' ie the first division of time, wasn't a subdivision of an hour, but was actually a sixtieth of a day, so actually 24 modern minutes in duration ... or was that 'day' just the twelve-hour daylight bit? I'm really not sure.

For specifing times for appointments or actions I guess reference was often also made to natural daily events: cock-crow, dawn, sunrise, noon, sunset etc. And as you say, in the middle ages the canonical hours were marked, at least in the western Christian tradition, by the tolling of church bells:

Vigil (eighth hour of night, about 2 a.m.)
Matins (a later portion of Vigil, from 3 a.m. to dawn)
Lauds (dawn, but varies seasonally)
Prime (early morning, the first hour of daylight, approximately 6 a.m.)
Terce (third hour, 9 a.m.)
Sext (sixth hour, noon)
Nones (ninth hour, 3 p.m.)
Vespers (sunset, varies seasonally)
Compline (end of the day before retiring, approximately an hour after sunset)

The timing for the all important bell ringer was dictated by a sundial or during the night by an hour-glass, timed candles, a water-clock (clepsydra) and from the late 13th century onwards, mechanical weight-driven clocks. The English word clock probably derives from the medieval Latin word, clocca, which is cognate with French, Latin and German words that mean a bell.

The measurement of a duration of time was often, at least in cooking, related to how long it took to recite the Lord's prayer or a certain number of Ave Marias etc. For example the cookbook 'The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digby Kt.', published in 1677, in describing the method for making the very new new drink, tea (which having only recently been introduced to English fashionable society by Charles II's Portuguese wife, Catherine of Braganza, then required detailed explanation for its correct preparation), says "... the water is to remain upon it no longer than whiles you can say the Miserere Psalm very leisurely".

Today while searching for a recipe in my copy of the Roman cookbook 'De Re Coquinaria', I came across the delightfully-named roman dry measure of a cocleare, literally "a snail's shell" which presumably was intended to mean an amount similar to a teaspoon full (it was for a quantity of ground spice). Another recipe called for a calix of wine - a calix being a cup or goblet - although how big that should actually be was equally unclear. These are both informal measures but the Romans did of course have a whole range of strictly defined volumetric measures, from a congius (a roman 'gallon' or about 3.27 litres) all the way through a sextarius (​1⁄6 congius), hemina (​1⁄12 congius), quartarius (​1⁄24 congius), acetabulum (​1⁄48 congius) and cyathus (​1⁄72 congius), down to a ligula (​1⁄288 congius).

And talking of volumetric measures, what about all the lovely old British units:
Gallon - 2 pottles, 4 quarts, 8 pints,
Pottle - 2 quarts or ​1⁄2 gallon,
Quart - 2 pints or ​1⁄4 gallon,
Pint ​- 1⁄8 gallon,
Gill or Jill - 2 jacks, ​1⁄4 pint, or ​1⁄32 gallon,
Jack - usually ​1⁄2 gill,
Dram - ​1⁄8 fluid ounce or 60 drops.

Then there were the measures specific to certain liquids, such as a firkin (from Middle Dutch vierdekijn meaning "fourth") being a quarter of a barrel, or 8 gallons, if used for ale, but quirkily it was defined as being 9 gallons if it was beer. While for wine there were:
Rundlet - 18 wine gallons or ​1⁄7 wine pipe,
Wine barrel - ​1⁄2 wine hogshead,
Tierce - 42 wine gallons, ​1⁄2 puncheon or ​1⁄3 wine pipe,
Wine hogshead - 2 wine barrels, 63 wine gallons or ​1⁄4 wine tun,
Puncheon or tertian - 2 tierce, 84 wine gallons or ​1⁄3 wine tun,
Wine pipe or butt - 2 wine hogshead, 3 tierce, 7 roundlet or 126 wine gallons,
Wine tun - 2 wine pipe, 3 puncheon or 252 wine gallons.

Then there were all the measures for loose dry goods such as grain:
Peck - 16 pints,
Kenning - 32 pints,
Bushel - 64 pints,
Strike - 128 pints,
Coomb - 256 pints,
Seam - 512 pints.

Just think how all these have influenced the English language: a wee dram; give him a pint and he'll take a quart; don't hide your light under a bushel; Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers; a drop of honey catches more flies than a hogshead of vinegar; one drop of poison infects the whole tun of wine; a pint of sweat saves a gallon of blood, etc. And is it just coincidence that it was Jack and Jill who went up the hill to fetch a pail of water?

I like those lists MM. I'm wondering what the Roman word was for 2 sextarii (i.e. a quarter of a congius). In English 2 Gills make a Cup or a Glass - very important measurements in themselves. 

The Glass as a measurement is seemingly becoming archaic. I've lost count of the number of times pre-pandemic I'd pop into a pub for a swift drink and order a glass of beer. The bartender would invariably reach for a pint-glass and nearly start filling it before I'd have to say "Not a whole pint please, just a glass!" which would prompt a quizzical "You'd like half a pint?" to which I'd reply "Yes, half a pint - a Glass."

Further to my comment about informal measures used in cookbooks, Hannah Glasse in 'The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy' (1747) on several occasions specifies spice quantities in terms of "as much as you can heap on a shilling". Assuming one is using an 18th century shilling, that would actually be a fairly precise measure. More uncertain is the measure that I seem to remember being flummoxed by in Robert May's 'The Accomplisht Cook' (1660) when he specified "quantity; one penny's worth." Did he mean something similar to Hannah Glasse's usage; ie enough to pile onto a penny? Or did he mean an amount that would cost a penny? Or, did he mean an amount that would weigh the same as a penny, or even more precisely that would weigh one pennyweight, where a pennyweight was a mass officially defined as 1⁄240 of a pound weight?

Personally I still often use my granny's old system:

1 twist = ¾ pinch
1 pinch = 2 shakes
1 shake = 1 ½ sprinklings
1 dollop = 2 ¾ knobs
1 hint = ⅓ smidgen
1 handful = 22 smidgens
1 splash = 3 squeezes
1 generous splash = 1 ¾ splashes
1 glug = 6 generous splashes
1 wineglass = 125ml ... but only if it appears at the beginning of the recipe. If towards the end it equals whatever little is left after the chef’s tipple. If, as usual, none, then 6 glugs of cooking sherry or failing that 3 of whatever holiday liqueur is in the back of the sideboard.

Or as Mrs Beeton in 'The Book of Household Management' (1861) frequently, though rather unhelpfully, specified: "Take a sufficiency of ...".

Knowing Priscilla's interest in sailing, I'm surprised she didn't mention 'knots' in the OP. A knot is a nautical measure of speed, in that it is one nautical mile per hour, where a one nautical mile is equal to one minute, or one sixtieth of an angular degree of latitude along any line of longitude. Today the international nautical mile is defined as exactly 1852 metres (6076 ft; 1.151 mile).

Etymologically, the term derives from counting the number of knots tied in the line that unspooled from the reel of a "chip log" in a specific time. A chip log consisted of a wooden panel weighted on one edge to float perpendicularly to the water surface and thus present substantial resistance to the water moving around it, and attached by line to a reel. The chip log was cast over the stern of the moving vessel and the line allowed to pay out. Knots tied at a distance of 47 feet 3 inches from each other passed through a sailor's fingers, while another sailor used a 30-second sand-glass to time the operation. The knot count gave the ships speed through the water to be used in the sailing master's dead reckoning and navigation. This method gives a value for the knot of 20.25 in/s or 1.85166 km/hour which is only very slightly different from the modern definition of a knot.

Meles meles wrote:

A knot is a nautical measure of speed, in that it is one nautical mile per hour, where a one nautical mile is equal to one minute, or one sixtieth of an angular degree of latitude along any line of longitude.

Or in other words - if you're travelling at 1 knot then you're doing 1 minute per hour. If you're doing 60 minutes per hour then you must be in a speed boat and if you’re travelling at 900 minutes per hour then you’re probably a 17th century round shot cannonball. As a cannonball it would take you about 12 seconds to travel 3 nautical miles – i.e. 1 league.
 
Derived from the Latin 'leuga' which was 1 and a half Roman miles, the league would become the basis of the ‘3 mile limit’ which defined territorial waters and was the basis of much of international maritime law for many years. This in turn was based on the ‘canon shot rule’ dating from the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries which stated that a country could lay claim to jurisdiction over that part of the sea which was within range of its land-based cannon. For this reason the canon shot rule and the 3 mile limit have become interchangeable terms in the popular imagination.

The problem with this, however, is that the range of 17th century cannons varied markedly with the maximum range being about 1 nautical mile. The aforementioned cannonball, therefore, wouldn’t have been able to travel for 12 seconds but would have splashed into the water after 4 seconds. It was only in the second half of the 18th century that advances in artillery saw the development of canons able to range 2 miles and then by the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries able to range up to 3 miles. And it is from this era (the 1790s and 1800s) that the 3 mile limit began to be written down in legal documents mainly in the English language by British and American officials. Those writing at that time, such as Thomas Jefferson of the newly independent United States suggested that the 3 mile limit was an existing fact ‘recognized by treaties between some of the powers with whom we are connected in commerce and navigation’ and based on the canon shot rule ‘the utmost range of the cannon ball, usually stated at one sea league … or three geographic miles from the seashores.’ It’s likely that during the 18th century the 3 mile limit had developed as an unwritten convention to supplement the canon shot rule. If canon could range 1 or 2 miles out to sea, then by staying 3 miles out would mean that you were well clear of that country’s territorial water and therefore unlikely to invite incoming fire upon yourself.
 


(Statue of Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of State and later President of the United States and a proponent of the 3 mile limit)

The 19th century would see the heyday of the 3 mile limit due largely to its promotion by the British Empire and the United States and its adoption by the Netherlands, Germany, Russia, Italy, Greece, the Ottoman Empire et al. There was, however, also considerable opposition from some quarters such as from France, Spain, Portugal, south and central American countries and the Scandinavian countries who all proposed their own variants. Even within the British Empire the limit was not an absolute with exceptions aplenty, such as Hong Kong being afforded at whopping 100 mile limit on the grounds that the South China Sea was teeming with pirates, and varying distinctions being made between fishing rights, customs duties, whaling and sealing concessions, oyster and pearl farming (a 20 mile limit for Ceylon in this case) and undersea mining etc.
 
By the time of the First World War and the Russian Revolution the era of the Pax Britannica was well and truly over and this was proven in the 1920s when a proposal at the League of Nations for the 3 mile limit to be adopted officially as a global standard was defeated. The League could not agree upon the league as it were. Today the 3 mile limit is only used by a handful of states and territories around the world with neither the UK nor the US being among them.

That was interesting Viz. The French too had an old pre-metric measure largely equivalent to the English league, the lieue, which was defined in terms of French feet (a lieue de paris was 12,000 pieds du roi, but there was also the lieue de 25 au degré which like the English nautical mile was linked to the circumference of the Earth, with 25 lieues making up one degree of a great circle). Metric measures (metres, kilograms etc) were officially adopted in 1793 following the Revolution but their usage was not fully enforced and in 1812 Napoleon introduced the system of mesures usuelles which restored some of the traditional French measurements, such as the pied, pouce and livre in the retail trade, but now redefined in terms of metric units. Hence the metric foot, or pied métrique, was defined as one third of a metre. Similarly the nautical lieue métrique was defined as exactly 4,000 metres or 4km.

It is this unit that Jules Verne referred to in the title of his adventure novel Vingt mille lieues sous les mers: Tour du monde sous-marin, otherwise known as 'Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea'. The title of course refers to the distance travelled under the various seas and not to any depth attained. As the metre had originally been defined as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle, the distance of 20,000 lieues (or 80,000 km) is almost exactly twice around the Earth's circumference. The greatest depth reached in the novel is four lieues (16 km) which is nearly 5 km deeper than the deepest point in the Earth's seabed (the Challenger Deep in the Western Pacific Ocean at the southern end of the Mariana Trench) not that Jules Verne would have known that because the Challenger Deep wasn't found and its depth measured until five years after the first edition of the book was published in 1870.

Another old French unit - the arpent, is mentioned in this : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3jYDfqMYMk

By spelling it as 'erpent' I guess Guillaume de Machaut was just trying to find a rhyme for serpent, particularly as an arpent is usually associated with measuring the area of land rather than a snaky length:

Phyton, le mervilleus serpent
Que Phebus de sa flesche occit.
Avoit la longueur d'un erpent,
Si com Ovides le descrit.
Mais onques homs serpent ne vit
Si fel, si crueus ne fier
Com le serpent qui m'escondit,
Quant à ma dame merci quier.

The word arpent seems to derive from the Late Latin arepennis, which in turn comes from the Gaulish are-penno ("end, extremity of a field"). As a measure of length an arpent denoted the length representing the side of a square of an arpent of area, where the square arpent or arpent carré or arpent de Paris, was defined as 220 x 220 French feet. 220 French feet is about 234 English feet - ie a French foot was about 3⁄4 inch longer than an English foot (which incidentally is why Napoleon is so often described as being short: his personal physician, Francesco Antommarchi, said that his height was just over "5 pieds 2 pouces" (using French units) which is just over 5’5" (in English units) or around 1.69m, so barely ½ inch below the period’s average adult male height).

Arpents are still sometimes used in some regions of North America that were originally French colonial possessions. While the arpent carré used in France was 220 x 220 French feet, for some reason in the French North American colonies the arpent carré (or French acre as it became known) most commonly used was 180 x 180 French feet (roughly 192 x 192 English feet, or about 0.845 English acres, or some 3419 square metres). In Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, the official conversion is now 1 arpent = 0.84628 acres (3,424.8 square metres); in Arkansas and Missouri, the official conversion is 1 arpent = 0.8507 acres (3,443 square metres). The term is also occaisionally still used in Quebec. Voltaire, in Candide, sneeringly dismissed Canada (Nouvelle France) as "Quelques arpents de neige" - a few acres of snow.

The song is actually supposed to be a way of sidling up to Gaston Phebus, Comte de Foix, whose court was renowned for its luxury.

I was recently interested to learn that a hobbit (or hobbett, hobbet, hobed, from the Welsh, hobaid) was an old Welsh unit of dry volume (defined as two and a half imperial bushels), although in practice it was also often used as a unit of weight, with the exact conversion to imperial units depending on the specific goods. Accordingly in Flintshire in 1888 it was recorded that a hobbit of oats weighed 105 lbs, a hobbit of barley 147 lbs, a hobbit of wheat 168 lbs and a hobbit of beans 180 lbs ... but for potatoes a hobbit was 200 lbs if they were old potatoes, or 210 lbs if new potatoes. It was further complicated in that Welsh farmland was sometimes denominated by its productive capacity instead of its physical area, so that a plot might be registered as "a hobbit of land", that is, large enough to grow one hobbit of grain per year.

I wonder if Tolkein, linguistic expert that he was, was aware of these Welsh hobbits.