The Exchequer Standards may refer to the set of official English standards for weights and measures created by Queen Elizabeth I (English units), and in effect from 1588 to 1825, when the Imperial units system took effect, or to the whole range of English unit standards maintained by the Court of the Exchequer from the 1200s, or to the physical reference standards physically kept at the Exchequer and used as the legal reference until the such responsibility was transferred in the 1860s, after the Imperial system had been established.[1]
The Exchequer standards made in the reign of Queen Elizabeth were not authorized by any statute. The standards were ordered by the royal authority, as appears from a roll of Michaelas terms in the 29th Elizabeth, preserved in the Queen's Remembrancer's Office, and containing the royal proclamation.[2]
The Exchequer Standards were so called because their repository had always been the Court of the King's Exchequer.[3]
Notably, Elizabeth I's redefinition of these standards instituted the English Doubling System, whereby each larger liquid measure equals exactly two of the next-smaller measure.
- ^ Decimal Coinage Commission, Great Britain (1857). "Weights and Measures: COPY of a Letter from the Comptroller-general of the Exchequer to the Secretary of State for the Home Department, dated 9th February 1859, and of the enclosed Copy of a Report from the Astronomer Royal, on the subject of Weights and Measures". Retrieved 13 September 2016.
- ^ Decimal Coinage Commission, Great Britain (1857). Questions Communicated by Lord Overstone to the Decimal Coinage with Answers. p. 8. Retrieved 12 September 2016.
- ^ Ricketts, Carl (1996). Marks and Marking of Weights and Measures of the British Isles. Taunton, Somerset: Devon Design and Print. ISBN 0-9528533-0-2.
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