Old Scottish Measures

The first attempt to standardize measures in Scotland was when a commission in 1661 recommended that exemplars for national standards should be kept in certain burghs: the ell for lineal measure in Edinburgh, the troy stone for weight in Lanark, the jug for liquid capacity in Stirling, the firlot for dry measure in Linlithgow. These recommendations were more or less kept to till the Act of 1824 when Imperial measures were statutorily established. Gradually they were conformed to, but it is not certain that recipes after 1824 necessarily kept to the new measures: just as metric and Imperial go hand in hand today and many continue with established systems. To confuse even further, they continued to use the old names such as firlot, forpet and lippie (still sometimes heard today in some rural areas) for fractions of the Imperial hundredweight.