Definition
A unit of liquid measure equal to ten gallons. The anker was used historically as a standard measure for wine, spirits, and other liquids in commercial and legal contexts, particularly in trade and customs documentation.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A measure of wine or spirit equal to 10 gallons; a barrel of this capacity.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A liquid measure in various countries of Europe. The Dutch anker, formerly also used in England, contained about 10 of the old wine gallons, or 8 imperial gallons.
The legal and common meanings align closely here, but researchers should note the precision gap: legal instruments and customs records used the anker as a fixed quantity of exactly ten gallons, while in practice the measure varied by country and commodity. What counted as ten gallons also depended on whether wine gallons or imperial gallons were being reckoned — a distinction with real consequences for duties, excise, and commercial disputes.
Why It Matters in Research
The anker appears almost exclusively in historical sources — customs records, excise regulations, shipping manifests, and commodity contracts from the colonial and early national periods through the nineteenth century. Researchers encountering the term in legal instruments should be alert to two complications.
First, the gallon standard matters. The anker was typically reckoned in old English wine gallons, not the imperial gallon standardized in Britain in 1824 or the U.S. liquid gallon. In pre-1824 British documents and in American sources generally, ten wine gallons is the working assumption. Post-1824 British sources may reflect the imperial standard, which produces a different quantity. A discrepancy in duty assessments or cargo tallies may trace back to this shift.
Second, the anker as a physical barrel sometimes appears distinct from the anker as a paper measure. Cooperage varied, and a cask labeled an anker in a bill of lading might hold slightly more or less than the legal measure. Courts and customs officials occasionally had to resolve disputes turning on this gap between the nominal and actual capacity of a vessel.
The term is effectively obsolete in modern legal usage. Its research value is almost entirely historical: tracing it into twentieth-century or contemporary sources would be anachronistic and likely indicates a quotation or archival reference rather than a live legal standard.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary define the anker identically: a measure containing ten gallons. The entry is minimal in both sources — a one-line definition with no elaboration on jurisdictional variation, commodity context, or the gallon-standard question. Webster's 1913 adds useful context that the historical dictionaries omit, noting the Dutch origin of the measure, its former use in England, and the distinction between old wine gallons and imperial gallons. Researchers relying solely on Black's will have the core definition but will miss the practical complexity that made the measure legally significant in actual disputes.
No edition of Black's surveyed here addresses the anker's role in excise or customs law, nor its appearance in shipping and trade instruments. For those contexts, period-specific commercial law sources and customs regulations will be more informative than the general legal dictionaries.
Jurisdictional Note
The anker was used in Dutch, German, Scandinavian, and English trade law, with the exact quantity varying by jurisdiction and era. In American legal sources, the ten-wine-gallon standard prevails. English sources from after 1824 may use imperial gallons as the baseline. Continental European sources may reflect still different local standards.