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Texto reemplazado: «<sup>th</sup> century» por «th century»
The Decimal Metric System was legally created in 1795 and on its fifth anniversary, in 1800, it became the legal norm in France and the use of any other system was banned. It was implemented as a universal system by the Metre Convention (Paris 1875) and confirmed by the first General Conference on Weights and Measures (Paris, 1889). Its purpose was to unify and rationalise measurement units for their characteristics to be neutral, universal, practical and easily reproducible. There were three basic aspects: the metre as a unit of length, the kilogram as a unit of weight and the second as a measurement of time; and from there, their multiples and submultiples.
As far as Spain was concerned, even though the Weights and Measures Act was passed in 1849, in the reign of Isabella II of Spain, use of the Decimal Metric System took a considerable time to become commonplace given how deep-rooted the old measures were. The traditional measurements and the means and utensils to determine them gave way to the new ones with the gradual introduction of the Decimal Metric System. The first attempts to implement them in Spain occurred in the mid-19<sup>th</sup> 19th century<ref>The Weights and Measures Act of 19 June 1839 made it compulsory to use the decimal metric system in all commercial transactions and Royal Order of 9 December 1852 established the official equivalence between the older measurements of all Spanish provinces with the legal metric ones. The equivalences can be found in the following document of the Spanish Metrology Centre (CEM), available at: www.cem.es/ sites/default/files/00000458recurso.pdf.</ref>. One such example is that Viana local council in Navarra received a collection of Decimal Metric System units in 1868 and they had previously been using the old measurements. Many of those old units have survived to the present, or at least until a few decades ago, even though they coexisted alongside the official system and, as we will see, the equivalences were not precisely known.
Furthermore, as this text may led us to believe, the, in principle, same measurements differed from one place to another, but that was not important as products were traded and exchanged in a small territory and the people there knew the equivalences and were not really interested in what the value would be elsewhere.
An attachment could be seen to measures still in use 150 years after they had been officially replaced.
In Zeanuri (B), it was reported that many measures by weighted coexisted with the Decimal System, which became mandatory in the second decade of the 20<sup>th</sup> 20th century. Up until then, for example, stone weights were used in the mills even though they were officially banned. Weights of that type, with add-ons in the forms of rings or irons stuck to the handle can still be seen in some local mills.
In the last decades of the 20<sup>th</sup> 20th century, a good number of measurement units still continued to be used in some places. These included the ''obrero'' or ''gizalana'' (the amount of land one worker could work in a day) as an area unit, the ''cántara ''or pitcher for wine, and the ''azumbre'' (roughly half a gallon), pound and liquid quart for wine, milk and oil. ''Fanegas ''(Spanish bushels) and ''celemines'' (smaller bushels with 12 to 1 ''fanega) ''were used for grain, flour and potatoes. Many of those measures have lost their currency and even the oldest people surveyed who had used them found it hard to accurately remember them.
The measures collected and described in the field research of the surveyed locations often required a tool to measure. Some, but obviously not all, the homesteads had some measurement instruments.