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to bottom of pageThe Burgar/Burgess families in Shetland
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The use of the 'Merk' in Shetland.
The Merk was the unit of measurement in the Shetlands, but is a really confusing system, and seems to be inherited for the Viking system.
A Merk could be the unit of money or weight or area.
The usual currency in the early 1700s was the Scottish £, referred to a £Scot.
English currency was sometimes use and this was referred to as £English.
£12 Scot was worth £1English (i.e. £1Scot was £0.1s.8d English)
The Merk was valued at 1 Merk = £0.13s.4d Scot (i.e. ⅔rd of a £1Scot).
(For those brought up with the decimal system this is tough going).
However, there was also a barter system, where goods were sold in lieu of money. Such goods were butter, fish, oil, tobacco, woven cloth (wadmel) etc. Each of these items had a fixed price.
Nearly everything was measured in Merks (and then sometimes, converted to £Scot).
A 'land' Merk was originally the area of land that could be bought for a Merk (and approximates to about 1⅓ acres in Shetland). The rental value of a Merk of cultivatable Land in Dunrossness in about 1700 was £2.10s.2d Scot.
A 'weight' Merk, was about 1lb and, in the case of Butter, had a value of £0.2s.0d Scots.
Butter and such objects were often sold by the Lispound, i.e. 24lb weight. A lispound of butter would thus be worth 24 x £0-2s-0d or £2-8s-0d Scots
Other items were valued by the pint. For example, 1 pint of oil was valued at £0-1-8d Scots
Sometimes, persons paid money on behalf of other tenants, or received money back from other tenants.
In 1628 the rental value in Merks of the whole of Shetland, by Parish was: 13