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Gateway Essay: Colonial America and Medieval TechnologyIntro | Medieval | Mill | Forge | Problems&Solutions | Continuations V. ContinuationsHistorical labels are not always just conveniences for scholars. The fourteenth-century poet Petrarch invented the term "Middle Ages," inspired by the eighth-century historian Bede's phrase "Middle Earth" to identify the location of humanity (later borrowed by J.R.R. Tolkien). While they are useful, they can also hide continuation. Preceding the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century was a period of technological change that began in the twelfth century and encompassed colonial American society. The settlers of New Amsterdam built windmills like the medieval structures of their home, while the colonists at Jamestown built watermills like the ones that had stood in England for centuries. Scotch-Irish immigrants to the Alleghenies built mill towns and forges along the fast flowing rivers that they had learned to tame in the Highland zone of Ireland/Britain even as German colonists at Ephrata organized themselves into communal settlements that supported large scale mills and smithies. When a young British officer named George Washington was fighting in the French and Indian wars, chronologically he was as close to the medieval battle of Bosworth Field as he would be to Desert Storm. When that same young officer returned home and, much later, built a new threshing barn, his model was the medieval tithe barn of southern England.
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