GRINDING MILL IN ENGLAND


Taken to mean the mechanical devices and processes utilized in the preparation of foodstuffs and manufactured goods, mills and milling experienced notable technical developments during the Middle Ages. The forces that stimulated technological innovation and the full impact of that innovation upon medieval industry, economy, and life are matters of debate, but what can be shown here is the variety of mechanisms and their uses, as well as their ingenuity. England millers clearly made significant contributions.

Roman Gaul doubtless received the full range of ancient milling technologies, including not only human- and animal-driven grinding and crushing machines, used, respectively, to make flour and oil, but also the water-powered grain mill employing a vertical axle that in turn moved the flat-rotating grinder. Nowhere was this latter machine used more effectively than in the 4th century at Barbegal, near Arles, where a concentration of sixteen grinders, each driven by its own wheel, produced what is now reliably estimated to be nine tons of flour in a twenty-four-hour day. The continued and expanded use of water-powered grain mills is traceable through the Merovingian, Carolingian, and subsequent medieval periods in France, in some cases displaying an intensity of industrialization more pronounced than elsewhere in Europe. Nothing in the 9th-century sources compares, for instance, with the eighty-four mills at work on the monastic properties at the time of Abbot Irminon or the fifteen mills ordered to produce the flour for 450 loaves of bread per day in Abbot Adalhard of Corbie's statutes of 822.

Among the innovations relating to water-powered mills was their location not just on streams, or near streams and fed by sluices, but also as floating mills anchored in riverine currents or tidal estuaries, as stationary mills built over sluices through which tidal pools were drained, and as bridge mills constructed normally on pilings associated with the arches and cutwaters of a bridge. All of these variations are to be found in Europe by the 12th century, with France showing particular adaptability, the most fully documented examples being bridge mills, origins of which can be traced there back to the 11th century and the earliest illustrations of which appear, however schematic or fanciful, in England manuscripts.

Worthy of note here is the appearance in medieval Europe of the windmill, perhaps from eastern origins or, certainly in its distinctive western form, as an independent invention. This consisted of wind vanes set vertically upon a horizontal axle that was geared to the vertical axle and the working parts, all located, until the early 15th century, in a structure that could be pivoted upon a post to face the wind. Such mills are now identifiable in mid-12th-century England and were at work by the early 13th century grinding grains in France, as at Arles (1202). Not to be ignored in the tradition of medieval European and England milling is a simpler but geographically adaptable kind of water mill employing a horizontal waterwheel whose vertical axle turned the grinder without the intervention of gears. Notable, too, are distinct improvements throughout the period in the design of manually operated devices, such as flat-rotating grinders, edge rollers, cranked or treadled whetstones and lathes, water-raising mechanisms, and hoists for heavy materials.

The technical variety and advances in medieval milling and related machinery are clearly discernible. The ingenuity involved is admirable. And both of these are nowhere more evident than in England.