Building Community: MIlls and Millers Folksong

Mills and Millers in Old and New World Folksong

Just as the technology of mills and milling crossed from the Old World to the New with the North American settlers, cultural references to the prominence of that building and its purpose in everyday life also crossed over to the American colonies. Folksongs reveal the consistencies of mills, milling and millers between medieval and colonial culture in a wide variety of ways. The usual substance of these mill-related folksongs, originating in the British Isles and traveling with the immigrants over to North America, included not only the work of the mill, but also the figure of the miller. To a song, they paint this figure as one who is known throughout society as a selfish, grasping thief who takes advantage of anyone he can.

All classes were dependent on the millers' work, since it was a necessary step in obtaining bread, "the staff of life." [see BREAD ESSAY] Everyone who brought grain, whether of high estate or low, was grist for the miller's greed. Millers were most famous for short-weighting or overcharging the toll owed them for the use of the mill. [see also Mill Laws lesson]. Millers often refused to operate the mill under the eyes of their customers, to facilitate their short-changing of their patrons. The well-known expression, "Keep your nose to the grindstone" has lost its second part, which is as follows: "and keep your eye to the road." This section indicates that, when a miller saw approaching customers, he would stop mill operations until they were out of view once more.

The miller's negative reputation came to the New World along with mill technology. We have chosen selections from both literature and folksong to demonstrate the miller's unfortunate image. Our first example occurs in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales [see the Reeve's Tale lesson]. The others selected are folksongs whose origins go back to late medieval Britain, and were also well-known throughout the colonies. They show the miller in his nasty work, often in quite humorous ways. So widespread was the miller's terrible reputation in Colonial America that in an eighteenth-century document, a non-Moravian Pennsylvanian comments, with an air of surprise, on the uprightness of the Moravian millers in their business dealings:

Such close proximity, and downwind most likely, from the chicken coops would make for an unpleasant smell, to say the least.

However, the peasant points out that the miller lives quite comfortably indeed. When describing his poor meal, he says that "[t]he knife and fork were seldom seen/But in the carpet room," meaning that only the miller (and his family, if he had one) ate food substantial enough to require knife and fork (meaning meat), and that his dining room was well-set in tableware as well. He also describes the "black silk goons [gowns]" the miller buys for his wife with his ill-gotten gains, clothing most would consider "above the station" of a miller's wife. He goes so far as to accuse the master even more directly of his crimes:

Obviously, though, not everyone was willing to submit to the miller's cheating ways. Peasants frequently used handmills, such as querns, in the home to avoid the miller's fee to grind one's grain. Another song from approximately the same time as "Newmill" is called simply, "The Quern-Lilt; or Grinding Song." Its existence reveals the commonness of this practice, even giving insight into the sounds and rhythms of grinding grain for the day's food. [SEE ESSAY ON "RECOVERED RHYTHMS"] Even the sound of the quern, the song says, is enough to ease the hungry stomach, just as funeral laments sooth the mourning heart and the lullaby stills the baby:

The image of the shifty, untrustworthy miller who enriches himself by stealing from those who use his mill to grind their grain appears to have been incredibly long-lived and widely-known, appearing in a number of the folksongs which made their way to Colonial America. One of the most long-lasting and widely-known songs, called "The Dishonest Miller," sums up his reputation both succinctly and humorously. In this song, the old miller lies dying, and calls his three sons to him to determine which one is best to inherit the mill and its business, with the question, "'And if to thee the mill I give,/Pray tell to me what all you'll have.'" This question seems quite innocent, until the miller reacts to the first son's answer, that he'll steal one peck (the equivalent of a quarter-bushel) of every bushel he is given to run through the mill. The father expresses horror, and refuses him the mill ("'Oh, son, oh, son, if this you do,/You will not do as I have done;/To you the mill I cannot give'"), not because he promises to operate the mill dishonestly, but because he won't be operating it dishonestly enough: "'To you the mill I cannot give/For by those means no man can live.'" The second son promises to keep half of every bushel he mills, yet even that is not enough to meet his father's standards and earn his inheritance. Only the third son shows himself to be truly his father's son and therefore worthy of taking over the family business:

As horrid a picture as this paints of the milling profession, this song was known from Vermont to North Carolina, and moved with the westward expansion into Kentucky and Ohio.[9]

Other songs make the miller's reputation as greedy and stingy, just as it had been in the Middle Ages. "Gay Jemmie, The Miller" tells of a miller who loses the hand of the girl whose hand he sought in marriage, just by insisting on the addition of one more grey mare to the dowry:

The eponymous "Jolly Miller" has no such reservations, claiming that "[n]o lawyer, surgeon, doctor/Ever had a groat from me, ‘I care for nobody, no, not I,/And nobody cares for me.'"[12]

Another song, one known to have been brought over from the British Isles, makes an even harsher claim to the criminal nature of millers. "The Two Sisters" centers on jealous rivalry over a man between the two siblings, the younger having received a "gay gold ring" from a suitor the elder admired. The elder sister tricks the younger into going down to the wharf to "'see the ships a-sailing about'" where she pushes her rival into the sea. The younger girl does not end there, but rather swims as far as the miller's fish-pond. This might have been a happy ending, and the version which circulated by broadside in Britain as early as 1656, the final stanza says that "[t]he miller came out with his fish-hook/And fished the fair maid out of the brook."

However, the version recorded in America, recorded in the Southern Appalachians and Virginia, contains an additional two stanzas which cast millers in the familiar greedy light: