league

Nobody measures with the league any more; people read it, in Verne, in Spanish land-grant descriptions, in coaching itineraries and fairy tales, and this page exists mostly to turn what they read into kilometres. The conversions worth keeping: a statute league is 4.83 km, an hour's brisk walk, and a marathon is a little under nine of them.

The walking-hour origin is also why the league never standardised. An hour's walk depends on the road, so every country's league drifted to its own value, which is what the caution on this page is cataloguing. The three-statute-mile league here is simply the tidy English case, and it is exact only because the mile itself has been exact since the 1959 international yard.

The fairy-tale arithmetic is the detail a reader can take away: seven-league boots cover 21 statute miles in a stride, close to 34 km, a full day's forced march per step. Give the boots an ordinary walking cadence of a hundred strides a minute and they do about 200,000 km/h, half way to the Moon's distance in an hour, which is the kind of absurdity-check this site's length and speed types make a one-line calculation.