Building Community: Medieval Mills

THE MILL IN THE MIDDLE AGES

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Perhaps the most famous miller of all time is the Miller of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.(Fig. 1) His ribald tale of love and deception provided the response from the Reeve, who told a story of a miller whose self-importance led to his decline, which has delighted or scandalized audiences for centuries. While literature is not history, the popular idea of a miller as wealthy and false dealings -- "A theef he was forsothe of corn and mele,/ And that a sly and usaunt for to stele" -- has continued.

Mills in medieval Britain were the models for North America. As immigrants arrived in Penn's Woods or the lands of the Lords Baltimore, they tried to recreate the institutions they knew from their homes. The mill in medieval Britain had been more than merely a place to grind grain. It was the industrial centre of a complex that began with the growing of grain on estates, and that ended with the baker's loaf cooling on the board.

In the Middle Ages mills were governed by "milling soke"-- part of each manor's rights of lordship. The mill was the property of the lord of the manor who had a monopoly over milling. The lord of the manor was responsible for having enough mills to meet the needs of his people and he had to pay for all repairs on the mills.

Tenants on the manor were obliged to grind their corn at the lord's mill at a fixed rate of toll. For grain grown on the estate, the usual rate of payment was one-sixteenth of the flour. The grain of the lord was ground for free, and it was given priority. Only if the mill fell into disrepair could tenants have their corn ground elsewhere.

The earliest mills were powered by water, which turned the mill wheel. These water wheels had been used since the time of the Romans. We can tell how old a mill is by a process called dendrochronology. This is a way of counting the rings in the wood to determine its age. Windmills came later. Into the eighteenth century water and wind were the only non-human sources of energy. Not many of the medieval mills survive. In Herefordshire in England, for example, only about 6 remain.

The mill powered by water was driven by a paddlewheel, similar to those found on Mississippi Steamboats of the nineteenth century. (Fig. 2) The preferred wood in the Middle Ages was elm. The paddlewheel turned an axle that moved a system of smaller cogwheels. That turned the mill stone, which ground the grain.

The amount of water reaching the paddle wheel had to be regulated. Too much would damage the wheel, and too little would fail to turn the wheel. So an artificial stream, called the sluice was dug and the sluice gates regulated the amount of water reaching the mill paddle. Ponds were often made beside mills, in order to supply the water. They were often stocked with fish, because in the Middle Ages people could not eat meat on Fridays or Church Holy days. They could eat fish, which was a valuable source of protein. A particular favorite type of fish was the eel, a snake-like fish, which is still eaten today in Britain after it has been jellied.

Our knowledge of this industry and how it operated really begins in the late eleventh century. By then, mills were important. In 1086 a survey was made in England called Domesday Book. King William the Conqueror sent out census takers to get information about the kingdom of England. They were interested in taxes, but they collected a vast amount of information about how the country operated. They counted all the land, animals, and people of the kingdom. According to their survey, in England at that time there were 9250 manors (large farms). There were 5624 mills on 3463 of those manors; several of the manors had more than one mill.

The most important structure in many of these manor villages was the mill. An indication of how the mill was part of a wide economic area comes from the Domesday survey for Oxfordshire, which is a typical shire. The number of mills often indicates the size of a manor village. After Oxford town (not a manor village) the next largest was Adderbury, which had 8 mills, followed by Shipton under Wychwood (6 mills), Cropredy and Chalgrove (5 mills), Banbury and Enstone (4 mills), and Chipping Norton, Drayton, Heyford, and Stanton Harcourt (3 mills). Banbury was also a market town. Woodstock and Banbury were market towns. The traffic between these multiple Mill villages and local outlying, manors, plough lands and estates was the highest in Oxfordshire.

Most of the mills were used for grinding grain into flour for bread. The tenants of the lord or lady of the manor were forced to grind their grain at the manor's mill; the miller received a part of the flour as his payment and the lord of the manor also received a payment. This was often a temptation for the miller, and the millers had a poor reputation in the Middle Ages, as noted in Chaucer's Reeve's Tale.

Mills were also used for other tasks, such as draining wetlands and for fulling cloth. Fulling is the process that cleans wools and makes it pliable for use in making wool cloth. Before the use of a mill, a person put the wool in water and then walked on it to make it clean and soft. The Fulling mill was invented in the twelfth century and mechanical beaters replaced feet. This was important for a country such as England that depended on its wool trade for money. Around the fulling mill were other workers such as the staplers (people who graded and sold the wool), carders (people who combed the wool into strands) and spinners and weavers (who turned the wool into cloth).

The windmill was later than the watermill, but similar in design and use. These mills were developed in the twelfth century in northern and central Europe, the region that is today known as Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Domesday Book makes no mention of windmills. The earliest written record of a windmill's existence in England is a rental note for a mill in Weedly, Yorkshire, and is dated 1185. There are records of a mill in Bury St. Edmunds built in 1191 in defiance of the local abbot who forbid its construction. Consequently, it was destroyed. The first illustration of windmill appears circa 1270 in the Windmill Psalter, produced at Canterbury.

Windmills were much cheaper to build and operate than watermills. They became very popular. Since they depended on the wind for power, however, they were not as reliable as watermills, nor were they as powerful.

Windmills became very popular in places with constant breezes, such as coastal regions and in plains. They were particularly good for pumping, and were used in northern Europe to remove water from low-lying ground. The famous Dutch windmills were often used as pumps.

The church was also involved in the windmill business. Pope Celestine III claimed that the church owned the air used by windmills. Therefore they must be built with the church's consent and a papal tithe paid for their operation.

The windmill could grind up to 1,000 bushels of grain a week, six bushels per hour if the wind was steady. The popularity of this energy source spread throughout the ensuing centuries until in 1400 there were 10,000 windmills in England, mostly in the South and the East where massive wheat fields are located, particularly in East Anglia, Kent, and Sussex. There were windmills in London as well, but the only evidence of their existence that remains today is in street names such as Great Windmill Street and Millbank.

A windmill was usually built on a mound or a hill to catch the wind but flat areas could also be used as long as wind turbulence created by trees, buildings, or other mills could be avoided. The design and operation of a windmill depended on various characteristics of the wind such as wind speed and changes in wind speed, wind direction and changes in wind direction, wind turbulence, and the height of the wind above the ground. An average wind speed of 15 to 25 miles per hour and a prevailing wind were necessary for operation of a mill.

There were two types of windmill. One type had the entire mill on a large spindle, so it could be turned to face the breeze (Fig. 3). The other type had a moveable roof, on which the windmill was fixed; this roof turned towards the prevailing breeze. All windmills had large sails, usually made of canvas, which caught the air and turned the gears.

The critical component of a mill's operation was the sails. The force of the wind on the sails caused them to turn and rotate the axle, or wind shaft, on which they were set. The brake wheel, located inside the top of the mill, also was attached to the wind shaft, and its movement drove the millstones and all other machinery inside the mill.

Mills have a long history. Emigrants brought both watermills and windmills to North America. The windmill would have the longest use, pumping water for prairie farms and ranches. Today the water- and windmills are being reexamined as an alternative source of power.

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