The Herring Counting System
A trade that counted in handfuls, all the way up to twelve thousand fish.
Origin
Customary along the Scottish and East Anglian coasts, with the cran given statutory force by the Fishery Board for Scotland in the late nineteenth century.
The catch
The base unit is four fish, because a tallyman holds two in each hand. Everything above it — the stick, the mease, the cran, the last — is built on the reach of a pair of arms working at speed on a wet quay.
The system runs on two incompatible principles at once, and the join is visible. Up to the mease everything is counted, fish by fish, in units derived from what a pair of hands can hold or a spit can carry. From the cran upward everything is measured by volume, in a branded wooden crate of 37.5 imperial gallons, because nobody counts twelve hundred herring on a quay at four in the morning. The changeover is where every dispute in the trade happened: a cran of small fish held more of them than a cran of large, so fishermen paid by the cran and curers buying by the cran wanted quite different things from a catch. The swill, an East Anglian wicker basket holding a third of a cran, was the vessel the fish actually moved in, while the bind of 250 was used for eels rather than herring, and the drift measured the nets rather than the catch.