Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Standards of measure in Medieval Europe

This page is an archive of the proposed deletion of the article below. Further comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or on a Votes for Undeletion nomination). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the debate was Delete --Allen3 ^talk 13:05, August 13, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Standards of measure in Medieval Europe

Same reason as for Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Standards of measure in the Copper Age above. Additionally, this is utterly broken as a concept because the units were often dramatically different from city to city and from time to time, even in the same country. For anyone interested, see Medieval weights and measures. Egil 08:52, 5 August 2005 (UTC)

• Delete as above. Proto t c 09:20, 5 August 2005 (UTC)

* Keep, Valuable, well researched, well cited, interesting, informative, good external links. Rktect 7:25, 8 August 2005 (UTC)

updated and under mediation

Rktect 6:03, 5 August 2005 (EST)

Egil claims "this is utterly broken as a concept

because the units were often dramatically different from city to city

and from time to time, even in the same country"

yet its very easy to see by looking at a list of German cities

that these "dramatic differances" are nothing more than a multiple of earlier standards.

Its not always the same multiple or the same standard and

in some cases they have multiple standards but its still reconstructable.

Part of what I am doing is giving the unit and the multiple for comparison

I can go back and compare what Ogilby said about the equivalence in 1607

shortly after Elizabeth changed the statute in 1593 and see that it makes

a difference what the reporters standard is at the time.

Looking at unit standards of measure comparatively by cultures

makes it much easier to see who shared measures with whom.

Medieval standards are different than copper age standards

because there are many references to their having been copied from Greek or Roman

units already well established in the popular literature as opposed

to obscure technical publications written in dead languages

so they are much easier to document and much more accessible web sources.

As to giving their values to the nearest whole mm rather than to several

decimals of mm, medieval standards are not precise to decimal mm

or variant to 10's of mm and generally best established to +/- 1 mm per foot.

For those cultures for whom there is a written contemporary primary reference

to sharing a standard (as with the Roman surveyor Hyginus Gromaticus

who traced the dimensions of local fields back to the standards established

by Claudius Ptolomy as the Romans first entered Germanica

which was cited on the discussion page for ancient weights and measures

There are long term investigations of the units involved and the results

are now considered basic historical fact.

In the past many people have applied an ethnocentric perspective

to "their measures" stating that they are "Anglo Saxon", "German",

"Danish" French or "English" when they actually have much longer

histories that have been explored in the literature.

Being able to see the connection broken down by conventional archaeological

period rather than simply lumped to gether as ancient makes the similarities

and differances much clearer

The objection that these studies are original research is also invalid

as their original sources have been cited on the discussion page and

in some cases transcriptions of the original ancient language with

translations given in English

• Delete as per all the other articles in this series. Nandesuka 17:26, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
  • Rktect's claim notwithstanding, there are no sources cited on the discussion page for this article. Nandesuka 19:06, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
    • Presumably you are aware that you are proposing to delete subsections of a larger page
    • on which the discussion exists at length and that user Egil massively rewrote the
    • entire main page to create the subsections labled by culture rather than by standard
    • so that it couldn't be as easily observed where the similarities were.

• Delete This is a list with zero usable data other than the list entries. A more correct title would have been A list of names of medieval measuring units - though I'd have voted to delete that, too, as being already adequately covered in Medieval weights and measures. ;-) Xaa 22:17, 5 August 2005 (UTC)

Rktect: 8/5/05

If you could provide a list of all the names of medieval measuring units

even for one year out of a period of over a millenia, that would be pretty impressive.

In some standard reference works people have tried to provide such a list by city,

or by country and region or province and then by city, generally focusing on major

periods of redefinition such as Queen Elizabeth's changes to the mile by statute in 1593

or the effect of the Metric system being passed into law in France in 1812.

Klein's "The World of Measurement" is pretty good that way, so are a couple of on-line sites

that compare various definitions of land.

In the standard reference works in which there is an attempt to collect them systematically

giving examples that match a definition, comparision tables are very useful.

I have seen a few attempts in the collection of medieval measures to show

where a measure is geo-commensurate or based on Greek or Roman standards but

in general the effect of Egils massive edit is that it no longer is easy to

compare one set of influences with another in two different kingdoms let alone

in two different periods.

On the Ancient Weights and Measures discussion page when user Egil first proposed this

I put sufficient facts to explain why its not useful to look at weights and measures

in isolation divided up not according to commercial interest but political interest.

The point he seems not to get is that measures define property and commercial interests

are very resistant to having someone change the rules when they are in the middle of

their transactions.

A really good book on this subject is "The Medieval Machine" by Jean Gimpel

• Delete as for all the other articles in this series. Ken 13:04, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in an undeletion request). No further edits should be made to this page.