With time trade relations with the neighbouring nations brought to use additional units, with names often borrowed from German, Arabic or Czech.
Among the commonly used systems were Austrian, Galician, Danzig, Kraków, Prussian, Russian and Breslau.
To add to the confusion, various goods were traditionally measured with different units, often incompatible or difficult to convert.
For instance, beer was sold in units named achtel (0.5 of barrel, that is 62 Kraków gallons of 2.75 litres each).
However honey and mead were recorded for tax purposes in units named rączka (slightly more than 10 Kraków gallons).
As the weights and measures were important in everyday life of merchants, in 1420 the royal decree allowed each voivode to create and maintain a single system used in his voivodeship.
Steel or copper rods used as local standard of ell (basic unit of length) were created in a voivode's capital and then dispatched to all nearby towns, where they were further duplicated for everyday use.
As clock towers only started to appear in late Middle Ages, and their usability was limited to within a small radius, some basic substitutes for modern minutes and hours were developed, based on Christian prayers.
By a royal decree of December 6, 1764 all units of measurement were to be converted to a new system, common to all of Poland and its dependencies.
For trade and everyday use it was further subdivided into the foot (stopa, ≈29.78 centimetres); sztych (≈19.86cm); quarter (ćwierć, ≈14.89cm); palm (dłoń, ≈7.44cm); and inch (cal, ≈2.48 centimetres), or gathered into the fathom (sążeń, 3 ells or 1.787 metres in length), such that:1 ell = 2 feet = 3 sztychs = 4 quarters = 8 palms = 24 inches ( = ⅓ of a fathom ).A different system of units, although complementary and interchangeable, was used in measuring lengths for agrarian purposes.