Maund

A stout two-handled wicker basket holding three hundreds of pilchards, and the working measure of the Cornish seine fishery.

Ten maunds made a hogshead, which made the basket both a container and a unit of account. Two men would sit astride the gunwale of a seine boat with a short line on each handle, dipping pilchards out of the tuck net and into the boat while a third kept tally. The size was not arbitrary: fifty to fifty-five pounds was reckoned the most a person could reasonably carry, though in practice a full maund needed two people because the load sat out in front and pulled the carrier off balance. The name is shared with the Indian maund, which took wildly different values in Bengal, Bombay and Madras, and the two are probably related at some distant root.