Its a little more than guess work unless you apply that to virtually 
every word found in old inventories. There are no standard spellings but 
at least unlike medieval documents most of the words aren't abbreviated
Pairs of steelyards and stilyards appear abundantly in the inventories. 
Shillard is at one extreme of acceptable spelling variation. of course 
there is a degree of interpretation but that applies to reading all old 
documents, identifying pottery etc. Recently I proved two medieval 
documents attributed to Anstey places in Leicestershire and Warwickshire 
were really Hampshire and my local record office had mistranslated the 
earl's oven as the earl's fort in a thirteenth century deed. A famous 
Welsh historian editing a Bristol cartlulary identified an English- 
named possession as being in Devon - it obviously never occurred to him 
it might be in the English colonised area of South Wales only a short 
distance away - nearly gave me a heart attack as it would have 
undermined a major thesis of mine about the 12th century frontier.Then 
there is an entire book chapter by amateur archaeologist based on the 
misreading of a street -name and the more well known archaeologist who 
mistranslated uln' as elm not ell- a measurement of cloth so a reference 
about repairing windmill sails became a windmill being rebuilt with elm 
trees in another book. However, if we retreat into total scepticism we 
would never translate any document or write anything. The great thing is 
there are loads of well known documents read by famous historians which 
can still be re-interpreted.


paul

Ron May wrote:

>Of course, balance scales had a pair of pans or cups to receive the items to 
>be weighed. Perhaps the "pair" refers to the pans that hook up to the balance 
>beam?
>
>I dont really feel comfortable with attributing a "shillard" to a "Steelyard" 
>without more evidence. All the guess work is just that.
>
>Ron May
>Legacy 106, Inc.
>
>  
>