A tron was a weighing beam in medieval

Scotland Scotland (, ) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Covering the northern third of the island of Great Britain, mainland Scotland has a border with England to the southeast and is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean to the ...

, usually located in the marketplaces of

burgh A burgh is an autonomous municipal corporation in Scotland and Northern England, usually a city, town, or toun in Scots. This type of administrative division existed from the 12th century, when King David I created the first royal burghs. Burg ...

s. There are various roads and buildings in several Scottish towns that are named after the tron. For example,

Trongate Trongate is one of the oldest streets in the city of Glasgow, Scotland. Trongate begins at Glasgow Cross, where the steeple of the old Glasgow Tolbooth is situated, being the original centre of medieval Glasgow, and goes westward changing its na ...

in Glasgow and

Tron Kirk The Tron Kirk is a former principal parish church in Edinburgh, Scotland. It is a well-known landmark on the Royal Mile. It was built in the 17th century and closed as a church in 1952. Having stood empty for over fifty years, it was used ...

in Edinburgh. Etymologically the word is derived from the

Old French Old French (, , ; Modern French: ) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France from approximately the 8th to the 14th centuries. Rather than a unified language, Old French was a linkage of Romance dialects, mutually intelligib ...

''tronel'' or ''troneau'', meaning "balance".

Measurement of weight in medieval Scotland

From the 12th century the city fathers of Scottish burghs needed to standardise

weights and measures A unit of measurement is a definite magnitude of a quantity, defined and adopted by convention or by law, that is used as a standard for measurement of the same kind of quantity. Any other quantity of that kind can be expressed as a multi ...

, partly to collect the correct taxation on goods, and partly to stop unscrupulous merchants shortchanging citizens. Trons were set up in marketplaces throughout Scotland. Each burgh had its own set of weights, which sometimes differed from those of other burghs. Some burghs had more than one tron; in

Edinburgh Edinburgh ( ; gd, Dùn Èideann ) is the capital city of Scotland and one of its 32 Council areas of Scotland, council areas. Historically part of the county of Midlothian (interchangeably Edinburghshire before 1921), it is located in Lothian ...

a butter tron was located at the head of the West Bow, while a salt tron was located further down the

Royal Mile The Royal Mile () is a succession of streets forming the main thoroughfare of the Old Town of the city of Edinburgh in Scotland. The term was first used descriptively in W. M. Gilbert's ''Edinburgh in the Nineteenth Century'' (1901), des ...

References

Obsolete Scottish units of measurement Weighing instruments {{Scotland-stub

Measurement of weight in medieval Scotland

See also

References