Ell

A traditional cloth-measuring length of 45 inches, descended from the arm-based measures of the medieval textile trade.

The English ell was fixed at 45 inches, being a yard and a quarter, and it existed alongside the yard rather than replacing it because imported cloth was woven to continental widths. That is where the difficulty starts, because no two countries agreed: the Scottish ell was 37 inches, the Flemish 27, and a merchant trading across the Channel had to specify which was meant or expect an argument. Two physical ells survive in public in Scotland. An eighteenth-century iron ell-stick is fixed to the corner of the Ell House in Dunkeld, a listed building of 1757 now run by the National Trust for Scotland, where merchants could check their own measuring rods against the standard before trading in the adjacent market place. The shaft of the seventeenth-century Kincardine mercat cross, now standing in the square at Fettercairn, is notched to show the same measure. The Scottish ell had been standardised in 1661 with its master exemplar held at Edinburgh, one of several national standards distributed among the burghs.