I think a mile is specified in terms of 'chains' not really feet or yards.
Feet and yards are meant for measuring smaller stuff, like the size of a foot, or a courtyard.
The 'chain' was a specific surveyors tool for measuring larger land areas. I imagine defined to be a length of physical chain practically manageable by the surveyor - probably pre-dating optical / triangulation methods before lenses got cheap.
I think an acre was then defined as 10 square chains or something.
But go back in time far enough and different jurisdictions have different lengths of standard chain, so different miles and acres derived from it. But it doesn't really matter because if you were buying land in Scotland, then you'd probably want to use a Scottish surveyor and his big long chain.
The nautical mile is then a whole other kettle of fish.
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 10 minutes ago
It’s not nonsense, just old and focused on priorities that don’t matter anymore. A mile was initially a thousand paces. So you send a group of people out, one counts each time their right foot takes a step and after a thousand times they build a mile marker. Bam, roman road system. 1000 strides per mile, 5 feet per stride.
Later the English used the unit as part of their system of measurement, and built the furlong around it, which is the distance a man with an ox team and plow can plow before the ox need to rest. A mile is eight furlong. This got tied into surveying units, since plots of land were broken up into acres, or the amount of land an ox team can plow a day.
When some unit reconciliation needed to be done, they couldn’t change the vitality of oxen, and changing the survey unit would cause tax havock, so they changed the size of a foot.
All the units and their relationships were defined deliberately and intentionally. They just factored in priorities that we don’t care about anymore.