From what I have read the original Roman mile is 5000 feet (mille passus) and a Roman foot is slightly shorter than our modern foot. I also read the in ~1500 the definition of a mile was 8 furlongs at 625 German/northern feet per furlong (therefore 5000 feet) and a German foot was longer than our modern feet and then during her reign Queen Elizabeth I shortened the foot but kept the length if a furlong and mile increasing the length if a furlong to 660 and increasing a mile by 280. Why did Elizabeth shorten the length of a foot to something more like the Roman foot?
In: Other
Taxes. Taxes back in the middle age on property were calculated by the acre. If the foot is shorter the mile is shorter. The shorter the mile, the more acreage a plot of land has. Shorten the foot, the landowners pay more taxes.
ancient and pre-modern units varied from place to place – there was an Athenian cubit, a Macedonian cubit, an Irish mile, an English mile, a Winchester bushel and a Manchester bushel, a Parisian pound and a pound tournois and so on. Chancelleries usually adopted one single measure, but this could be any one of those on offer (and in a decentralised country like France there were several chancelleries) – and anyway that was just for dealing with the government. Elizabeth’s officials may have just picked one.
I don’t know why specifically Queen Elizabeth chose the length she did, you might try r/askhistory to see if anyone knows why that change was made. I do know some about the history of measurements though. We are used to having precision in our measurements but for most of history that precision didn’t exist for long distances and they were mostly estimates.
The original roman mile was 1000 paces which was anywhere from 2500 to 5000 feet. It changed depending on the length of the person’s stride and the terrain. Distances were all estimates as modern surveying and map making didn’t exist.
As measurements became more precise people started having issues as all the established distances were inconsistent. A mile on this road turned out to be longer or shorter than a mile on this other road, so which one was the real mile?
This is why there are so many regional variations of the mile and why all the derivations changed over history.
Furlongs had a similar history. An acre was the amount of land one farmer with one oxen could plough in one day. A furlong was a row of this acre. Same problem here though, when measurements became precise everything was inconsistent. What resulted was a lot of different definitions of the same terms that were all slightly different.
Latest Answers