Church door

The door of Villefranche church is old and the pink marble from a quarry on the mountainside pretty enough.  The quarry still has cut blocks ready for transport but it was abandoned when the local workforce went off to fight in the First World War and there was insufficient manpower to reopen it afterwards. However, the most interesting aspect of the photo is the three chiselled vertical grooves on the left hand side of the door. These are measures used by traders. The longest at about two metres is the Montpellier measure, the second is the Belgian Cassel measure at 1.61 metres and the shortest is the Copenhagen measure at 1.25 metres. With these measures, traders calibrated their rulers to avoid argument.  Villefrance was once an important trading centre for canvas, ribbon and other cloth.