Definition
An archaic unit of measure and trade denomination used in the English wool trade. A sarplar designates a large bale or package of wool, standardized at eighty tods in weight, equivalent to 2,240 pounds. In older English legal and commercial usage, the term also appears in the sense of a pocket or half-sack of wool, indicating that the word was applied to more than one recognized quantity depending on context and period.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A large bale or package of wool, containing eighty tods, or 2,240 pounds, in weight.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A large bale or package of wool, containing eighty tods, or 2,240 pounds, in weight.
The common and legal usages are not identical. Burrill's legal definition describes a sarplar as a pocket or half a sack of wool — a meaningfully smaller quantity than the 2,240-pound bale described by Webster's and Wiktionary. A researcher encountering the term in a legal instrument, customs record, or trade statute should not assume it denotes the larger commercial quantity; the legal usage points to a sub-unit of the sack, not the full bale.
Common Confusion
The wool trade employed a layered system of weight and packaging denominations — the tod, the stone, the clove, the pocket, the sack, and the sarplar — and these were not uniform across all periods or localities. Burrill's identification of the sarplar as a pocket or half-sack places it within this hierarchy at a specific sub-sack level. The Webster's and Wiktionary definitions, by contrast, describe a larger bale unit. These may reflect different trade periods, regional customs, or distinct uses of the same term by different commercial communities. Neither definition is simply wrong; they likely capture different moments or contexts in the term's life. Researchers should not treat either as universally authoritative.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear almost exclusively in historical English legal records touching on the wool trade: customs accounts, exchequer rolls, staple regulations, wool export licenses, merchant contracts, and taxation statutes. It is a term of commerce absorbed into legal instruments, not a term of art generated by courts or legislation.
The critical research trap is the weight discrepancy between sources. If a document specifies a quantity in sarplars and the researcher applies the 2,240-pound figure from general dictionaries rather than the half-sack meaning from legal sources, any calculation of duty owed, cargo value, or contractual quantity will be wrong. The half-sack interpretation from Burrill suggests the sarplar was a unit used internally within the wool staple and customs system at a sub-sack level, while the larger bale definition may reflect trade usage in a different context.
Because the term belongs to the medieval and early modern English wool trade, it connects to the regulatory framework of the Merchants of the Staple and the wool custom and subsidy system that formed a major pillar of English royal finance from the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries. Records from that system — including enrolled customs accounts and parliamentary statutes on wool exports — are the primary corpus in which this term will be encountered.
No modern legal significance attaches to this term. It is exclusively of historical and archival research value.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole legal dictionary source available here, and its entry is brief: a pocket or half a sack of wool, placed squarely in old English law. Burrill does not elaborate on the statutory or case basis for this definition, which is typical of his treatment of trade measurement terms.
The divergence from Webster's 1913 is notable. Webster's gives the sarplar as 2,240 pounds — a figure that aligns with the English wool sack of 364 pounds multiplied to a full bale rather than a sub-unit. The two definitions cannot be harmonized into a single quantity; they describe different things, or the same word in different periods and usages. Historical legal dictionaries as a class tend to be more reliable on the legal-commercial meaning of wool trade terms as they appear in customs and staple records, making Burrill's half-sack definition the more trustworthy anchor for legal document research, while Webster's may better reflect later or general commercial usage.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to English law and the English wool trade. It has no recognized American legal counterpart and does not appear in the legal traditions of other common law jurisdictions in any meaningful way.