Faggot

A bound bundle of brushwood or small branches, customarily three feet in length and twenty-four inches in girth.

Faggots were the working fuel of the pre-industrial economy: bakers heated bread ovens with them, brickmakers and lime burners consumed them by the thousand, and they were counted and sold by the hundred rather than by volume. Because the size varied by locality, manorial and municipal regulations frequently specified a minimum length and girth to prevent short bundles being passed off. The word survives in the culinary sense of a bound bundle of meat, and in the bundled iron rods of Roman fasces, which carry the same idea of strength through binding.