Geography, Landscape, and Mills

Introduction | Watermills | Windmills | Resources | Activities

Watermills were a staple of some villages, most towns, and all cities from the ancient world onwards. Mills provided the power to grind grain into the principle processed food, flour, which fed society right into the modern period. And as populations grew, simple hand-mills, or querns, were unable to keep up with demand for flour. More importantly for the middle ages, however, feudal lords who had the resources to build mills also had the power to enforce mandatory milling (and fees) at those mills and saw mills as a great source of income (and control). At the same time, two interlocked logics encouraged the building of more and more watermills for agricultural purposes. Simple economies of scale argued for the construction of mills, so anyone who was able to so (either economically or through the license of a lord or town council) did so. Regardless, the mills farmers bringing grain to and taking flour away from the mills needed those mills sited where they were useful to the farmers (or timbermen, or papermakers, or cloth merchants – whichever commodity was being processed in the mill), as well as where they were able to do useful work. Otherwise a mill was about as useful as a truck stop on a two-lane dirt road.

  Regardless of the reasons that a person, town, or lord might want a mill, and independent of the economic and material ability to build a mill, mills require certain conditions in order to run, and run effectively. We will deal with each type of mill separately below, but speaking geographically, mills need to be situated within the environment so that natural and social resources can be harnessed to be best effect. For natural resources, this means water flow for watermills and wind for windmills, and both need to be situated in the landscape such that the raw materials can arrive at the mill and the finished product taken from the mill economically and effectively. For flour and grist mills, this means the grain had to be relatively close at hand to the mill, and flour also needed a market relatively nearby. Other uses of mills – to saw wood, to full cloth, and later to pulp rags for paper, among them – also had certain requirements that conditioned the placement of mills in the landscape.

  The goal of this lesson is to explain to students why mills appeared where they did and have students then explore their local surroundings for evidence of the once-common milling industry in every city, town, or even rural village.

Continue to: Watermills | Windmills | Resources | Activities