Antiquity[edit]

Stone weight with Darius the Great tri-lingual inscription. 9,950g

The Eschborn Museum's 2nd-century stone weight of 40 Roman pounds (c. 13 kg), beside an ID-1-sized card

for scale.

The name "stone" derives from the use of stones for weights, a practice that dates back into
antiquity. The Biblical law against the carrying of "diverse weights, a large and a small" [7] is more
literally translated as "you shall not carry a stone and a stone (‫)אבן ואבן‬, a large and a small". There
was no standardised "stone" in the ancient Jewish world, [8] but in Roman times stone weights were
crafted to multiples of the Roman pound.[9] Such weights varied in quality: the Yale Medical
Library holds 10 and 50-pound examples of polished serpentine,[10] while a 40-pound example at
the Eschborn Museum is made of sandstone.[11]

Great Britain and Ireland[edit]

The 1772 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica defined the stone:[12]
STONE also denotes a certain quantity or weight of some commodities. A stone of beef, in London,
is the quantity of eight pounds; in Hertfordshire, twelve pounds; in Scotland sixteen pounds.
The Weights and Measures Act of 1824, which applied to all of the United Kingdom of Great Britain
and Ireland, consolidated the weights and measures legislation of several centuries into a single
document. It revoked the provision that bales of wool should be made up of 20 stones, each of
14 pounds, but made no provision for the continued use of the stone. Ten years later, a stone still
varied from 5 pounds (glass) to 8 pounds (meat and fish) to 14 pounds (wool and "horseman's
weight").[13] The Act of 1835 permitted using a stone of 14 pounds for trade[14] but other values
remained in use. James Britten, in 1880 for example, catalogued a number of different values of the
stone in various British towns and cities, ranging from 4 lb to 26 lb.[15] The value of the stone and
associated units of measure that were legalised for purposes of trade were clarified by the Weights
and Measures Act 1835 as follows:[14]