Definition
A unit of weight used in commercial and legal contexts, historically defined as 112 pounds avoirdupois in English common law tradition. The hundredweight appears in legal instruments, trade statutes, contracts, and commodity regulations wherever goods are sold or taxed by weight. Because the definition of the unit itself varied by jurisdiction and era, the term carries significant ambiguity in historical legal documents.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A unit of weight equal to 100 pounds in the United States and Canada, or 112 pounds (one long hundredweight) in the United Kingdom.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A weight of 100 pounds avoirdupois in the United States; in England, 112 pounds.
The gap between common and legal meaning here is not definitional drift but definitional divergence across jurisdictions operating simultaneously. A researcher reading a 19th-century American legal document and an English legal document of the same period will encounter the same term denoting different quantities. This is not a matter of evolution over time — both definitions coexisted, and the legal operative weight depended entirely on which jurisdiction's law governed the transaction.
Common Confusion
The term invites the assumption that "hundredweight" means exactly 100 pounds, which is true in American usage but not in the English common law tradition, where the standard was 112 pounds. The English figure derives from the old mercantile practice of reckoning a hundredweight as 8 stone of 14 pounds each. Burrill cites Brande for the 112-pound standard as the common law baseline, while simultaneously noting that New York's Revised Statutes expressly fixed the hundredweight at 100 pounds. Researchers conflating these two standards when working across English and American sources will misread quantities in contracts, tariff schedules, and commodity dispute records.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a research trap in historical commercial law materials. The same word carries different numerical values depending on the source jurisdiction, and neither value is always stated explicitly — the drafter assumed the reader knew which system applied.
Key navigational points:
First, when reading English common law sources, treatises, or cases prior to American statutory reform, assume 112 pounds unless a contrary definition is stated. Burrill's citation to Fleta (lib. 2, c. 12) signals that the 112-pound standard has deep medieval roots in English law, predating modern statutory intervention.
Second, when reading American state statutes from the early republic period, do not assume uniformity. New York expressly codified 100 pounds by statute (1 Rev. Stat. 621, § 39). Other states may have retained the English standard, adopted 100 pounds, or left the question unresolved. In any dispute turning on the weight of goods, the governing state's weights and measures statute is the threshold question.
Third, commodity contracts, shipping records, insurance policies, and customs documents from the 18th and 19th centuries frequently use hundredweight as a pricing unit. A misread hundredweight standard translates directly into a 12% error in reconstructing the value of a transaction — material in any historical legal or commercial analysis.
Fourth, the term connects to the broader Law Mind corpus on weights and measures regulation, an area where early American legislatures worked actively to standardize inherited English measures that were themselves inconsistent. The hundredweight is one of several units where English practice was not uniform even domestically before American adoption.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the core entry: 112 pounds as the common law denomination, citing Brande's dictionary of science and the medieval treatise Fleta for the older English weight standard. Burrill then flags the New York statutory departure — 100 pounds avoirdupois under the Revised Statutes — as a known American modification.
What Burrill's entry efficiently captures is the bifurcation problem, though it does so narrowly through the New York example without surveying other American states. The citation to Fleta is useful for researchers needing to trace the historical continuity of the English standard into colonial-era American practice. The entry does not address the question of which standard governed in the absence of a state statute, which would have been the live dispute question in many early American commercial cases.
No single authoritative definition emerges from the historical sources; the term is jurisdictionally contingent by nature.
Jurisdictional Note
English common law fixed the hundredweight at 112 pounds. American states varied: New York by statute set it at 100 pounds avoirdupois. Federal customs and commerce regulations developed their own standards over time. Any legal analysis involving historical weights should identify the applicable jurisdiction's statutory definition before interpreting quantity terms in instruments or pleadings.