Talk:Tierce (unit)

Notes for article improvement

 * In this country [America] just as marked curiosities and barbarisms prevail. There are, for example, 32 gallons in a barrel of cider, 31 1/2 or 36 bgallons in a barrel of ale or milk, 30 in a barrel of fish, 42 in a tierce of wine or oil, 63 in a hogshead of wine, 34 in a hogshead of beer, 84 in a puncheon of wine.   Note that this appears to be a syndicated piece that ran in several newspapers.


 * The story runs that Edward III, in 1367, emulating the coronation of Petrarch, granted the office [of Poet Laureate] to Chaucer, with a yearly pension of 100 marks and a tierce of Malvoisie wine. .... In 1630 the laureateship was made a patent office in the gift of the Lord Chamberlain. The salary was increased from 100 marks to ₤100, and a tierce of Canary wine was added, which was commuted in Southey's time [1813–1843] for ₤27 a year.    Also a syndicated piece.


 * James Riley quotes from a round by William Gregory the younger and published in John Playford's "The Musical Companion" (London, 1667), p. 88. Tom Sanders is he that Draws us good Wine,/at Edmunton Town thre hangs out his sign;/He carries the Bell for Sack and terse Clarret,/Jack knows it well, & Paul will aver it.  Riley adds the following footnote to "terse":  = tierce, a measure of wine, one-third of a pipe, hence a cask containing this quantity.


 * Carey McIntosh tracks the definition of several units of measure dictionaries from 1658 to 1780. The tierce was listed as either 1/3 of a pipe (1658, 1755, 1775 and 1780) or 42 gallons (1676, 1708, 1721).  He comments:  The imprecisions in this table (e.g., more or fewer gallons in a pipe), and the disappearance of certain measures (e.g., cark, frail) are predictable from our knowledge of the history of science. Less predictable is the durability or reliability of the pearch, the tierce and the tod.


 * "Tierce" is also used to describe sugar and rum. Her Cargo 1 Hhd 1 Tierce & 8 barrels brown sugar; 2 Hdh & a Tierce Rum and 2700 Dollars all brought on shore..


 * Nicholas Pike's A New Complete System of Arithmetic (1788) was an early American mathematical textbook. Among the tables rarely found in current arithmetics were those of English money; troy and apothecaries' weights; and clot, wine, ale and beer measure. The measures of wine consisted of pint, quart, gallon, tierce, hogshead, puncheon, pipe and tun.


 * The measure is also used for salted fish. Further, a glossary would have been very helpful. This is generally true but becomes critical with respect to weights and measures.  For example, the reader is only belatedly told that a quintal is 112 pounds and a measure of salt fish.  Similarly, salted salmon appears to be measured by tierce.  By context, one could work out that it was a measure of that appeared to be something like a quintal.  However, it is explained in the supplement to the second edition of the Dictionary of Newfoundland English as being 300 pounds of salmon.    The book under review is John C. Kennedy's People of the Bays and Headlands: Anthropological History and the Fate of Communities in the Unknown Labrador, published 1995, UToronto Press.


 * Robert E. Hardwicke devoted an entire book, The Oilman's Barretl (Univ. of Okla., 1958), to the question raised by Mr. Carter. Whence the 42 gallon barrel as the unit of measurement for crude oil? Hardwick concluded that no one really knows.  Many possibilities have been suggested, including Mr. Carter's and the one described in our footnote.  A 42-gallon barrel was used for fish (but not wine) during the reign of Edward IV (1461-83); the first Pennsylvania oil drillers used whiskey barrels, which also held 42 gallons.


 * With respect to sugar: Taken hogshead 17 cwt., tierce 12 cwt., cask 9 cwt., barrel 2 cwt. Jamaica and Demerara hogshead 18 cwt.  Louisiana hogshead 1,250 lbs..


 * On Februrary 23 1882, the state of Maryland amended a 1819 statue to require that all importers of foreign articles commodities of dry goods, wares, or merchandise, by bale or package, or of wine, rum, brandy, whiskey, and other distilled spirituous liquors, &c., and other persons selling the same by wholesale, bale, or package, hogshead, barrel or tierce were required to purchase a $50 license. The law was struck down by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1827, with Chief Justice Marshall giving the majority opinion of the court.  figure out cite later


 * Also used for salted beef.


 * New England rum.


 * Tobacco


 * In 1886, the American Philological Association in a joint effort with the Philological Society of England made several recommendations for changing the spelling of English words, including changing tierce to tierse.


 * Begun in 1847 with a capital investment of $20,000, Jenck's Steam Mill was equipped with a 12-horsepower engine, employed twenty-five laborers, and turned out 15,000 pine tierce casks a year.


 * Most of the old English measures to which the metricists point with such scorn are obsolete. Nobody hears nowadays of the coomb, the pottle, the chaldron, the palm or the barleycorn. The perch, the puncheon, the span, the tierce and the toise are all but forgotten. Even the furlong, the gill and the rod are disappearing.


 * Excavation of 1841 wreck of the William Salthouse. Scholarly examination of casks.

Lesser Cartographies (talk) 04:12, 24 December 2014 (UTC)