Definition
An obsolete English method of weighing goods in which a staff or beam was balanced on the finger or hand, with scales or hooks suspended from each end. The operator judged the difference between a known weight and the item being weighed by feel and balance rather than by a fixed mechanical standard. The term refers both to the physical instrument and to the practice of using it in commercial transactions.
Common Confusion
Auncel weight is sometimes loosely grouped with other primitive balance methods, but it is distinct from the even balance (a two-pan scale on a fixed fulcrum) that English statutes eventually required in its place. The distinction matters legally because the prohibition on auncel weight was a prohibition on a specific instrument and practice, not on hand-held weighing instruments generally.
Why It Matters in Research
Auncel weight is primarily a term of historical legal significance encountered in two research contexts: early English commercial regulation and weights-and-measures history.
Researchers working in medieval English statutory materials will find auncel weight referenced in the context of trade regulation. Several early English statutes prohibited its use on the grounds that the method was inherently susceptible to fraud — a skilled operator could manipulate the result by adjusting finger position on the staff. Burrill notes that the even balance was mandated as a replacement. When tracing this legislative history, researchers should be aware that the statutes prohibiting auncel weight are among the earliest English consumer-protection measures in the commercial law tradition, placing this term at the intersection of trade law, fraud, and weights-and-measures regulation.
The term will not appear in modern legal sources. Its presence in Black's, Bouvier's, and Burrill's reflects the nineteenth-century dictionaries' commitment to completeness in cataloging obsolete English law terms that might appear in historical documents, land records, or early American colonial materials derived from English statutory practice. Researchers encountering it in primary sources should treat it as a marker of pre-modern commercial context rather than a term with continuing legal significance.
No jurisdictional variation is relevant at the operational level; the term is purely historical and English in origin.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries are in close agreement, which is itself informative: there is little interpretive dispute about this term because its legal life was narrow and its obsolescence complete by the time systematic legal lexicography began.
Black's (both editions) and Burrill share virtually identical language, each drawing on Cowell's definition — "a kind of weight with scales hanging, or hooks fastened to each end of a staff, which a man, lifting up upon his forefinger or hand, discerneth the quality or difference between the weight and the thing weighed." This consistency suggests all three editors were working from the same secondary source rather than independent primary research. Bouvier is slightly more compressed — "an ancient manner of weighing by means of a beam held in the hand" — and cites Termes de la Ley alongside Cowell.
Burrill adds the most useful legal context of the four, noting that auncel weight "being liable to great deceit, it was prohibited by several statutes, and the even balance co[mmanded]" — the entry appears truncated in available sources, but the substance is clear. This is the only one of the four dictionaries to supply the legal consequence (statutory prohibition) rather than merely the physical description, making Burrill the preferred source for a researcher who needs more than a definition.
None of the historical dictionaries identifies the specific prohibiting statutes by name or date, which is a gap researchers will need to fill through independent inquiry into early English commercial legislation.