While the bushel is now described as containing 8 gallons of wheat and each gallon 8 pounds of wheat, the old fiction is kept up that these are royal pounds. Only these pounds are now Troy, of 5760 grains, instead of Tower, of 5400 grains; 64 Troy pounds were equal to 52-2/3 lb. averdepois, a weight still far from the 62-1/2 lb. averdepois of wheat contained in the extant bushel-measure of Henry VII. And though the mints were coining 420, instead of 240, pennies from the 5760 grain-pound of silver, so that these were little more than half the weight of Henry III’s pennies, yet they were still of the weight of 32 wheat-corns. The substance of this statute was embodied in a State-document adorned with a picture of the King’s Steward presiding over the gauging of bushels and weighing of wheat-corns, surmounted by a picture of two entwined wheat-ears with the inscription: THE CONAGE OF THE MYNTE. The whete eare. Two graynes maketh the xvi p^{te}. of a penny, ffower graynes maketh the viij p^{te}. of a penny. After this impudent assertion one is not surprised to read that it was ‘the same tyme ordeired that xvi uncs of Troie maketh the Haberty poie a pounde for to buy spice[23] by,’ nor by the statement that ‘the C is true at this daye, ffyve score for the hundred as appeareth in Magna Carta.’ Footnote 23: Probably in the meaning of the Dutch _spijs_, food. Comment on these ingenious statements seems hardly necessary. The only changes in English weights since the time of Henry III, or indeed much earlier times, have been: 1. The raising of the hundredweight to 112 lb. 2. The lowering of the stone from 16 lb. to 14 lb. to make it one-eighth of the new hundredweight. 3. The rise of the averdepois pound from 16 Roman ounces of 437 grains to 16 ounces of 437-1/2 grains; a difference of 8 grains, so as to make it 7000 grains of the Tudor Troy pound. 4. The re-legalising of the 100 lb. or cental weight in 1879. I may observe that the octonary series of measures of capacity, also of the 14 lb. stone and new Cwt., is quite in harmony with the sexdecimal system, however objectionable be those units. _The Recognition of Averdepois Weight_ It is not until 1485 (Ripon Ch. Acts, quoted in the ‘New English Dictionary’) that we find mention of averdepois, though there had been standard weights of it from temp. Edw. III, ‘per balance cum ponderibus de haberdepase,’ and those standards were extant in the time of Elizabeth. The document embodying 12 Henry VII (1496) mentions, as has been seen, the Habertypoie pound, with the assertion that it was 16 Troy ounces, an assertion causing confusion for centuries afterwards.