Pilchard Hogshead
Modern equivalent
448 lb net, 476 lb gross. Nominally 3,600 fish, in practice 2,500–4,500
The export cask of the Cornish pilchard trade, originally 52 gallons and later described in legislation as 50, holding three thousands of pressed pilchards.
The pilchard hogshead is a different vessel from the wine or whisky hogshead, and it accumulated three separate identities: a volume, a weight and a fish count. Pilchards were packed into it under pressure and the oil pressed out was itself a saleable product. Thirty hundreds made a hogshead, or ten maunds, and the whole Cornish export trade to Italy and Spain was reckoned in them. From the 1870s smaller export units appeared to suit changing foreign demand, most of them straightforward subdivisions of the hogshead.