The mills of medieval England (review)

150 Reviews It is conventional to balance adverse criticism with some finding of positive value in a book under review. I think this task can best be left to other reviewers. Hilary Carey Department of History University of Sydney Holt, R., The mills of medieval England, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1988; pp. x, 202; 9figures;5 plates; R.R.P. A U S $ ? The crushing of grain is one of the oldest and most ubiquitous industrial processes. It is fundamental for preparing the raw materials for bread, gruel and beer, but because of its very ordinariness it has not been much regarded by general historians. The historian of technology and many archaeolgosits have discussed the various forms of grain-crushing devices, from quems to ceramic rollers, and have analysed the workings of various forms of mills powered by human beings, animals, water, wind or steam. Richard Holt has built on the work of these historians (to w h o m he is less than gracious) and has attempted to analyse the place of flour-mills, their millers and their proprietors, in the general economy of the English Middle Ages. Despite the title, the book is a research work of significance only for the period between Domesday Book and the Black death. The introductory section on earlier water-mills is entirely derivative and is open to challenge on the whole question of water-power in the late Roman Empire and the Dark Ages. The treatment of the later fourteenth century and the fifteenth is slender and oldfashioned . By contrast to the sections on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it lacks wide familiarity with the sources, in particular court-rolls and account rolls. As a result the important conclusions reached by Dr Holt for the high Middle Ages are not fully prepared nor followed through. For example, Holt very plausibly proposes that water-mills powered by horizontal wheels (which avoid expensive gearing) are characteristic of societies such as Spain or Italy where small peasant proprietors were free to builld their own modest mills, while more substantial water-mills powered by vertical wheels and transmission gears were suitable for seigneurial investment in France and England. He does not, however, ponder why the Tamworth mill of the 850s, built for a very seigneurial Mercian indeed, had a horizontal wheel or why the Irish in the seventh and eighth centuries were building some mills with horizontal wheels and some with vertical. The potential for multiple mills with a series of horizontal wheels each turning its own millstones is well known in m o d e m Romania or Portugal and skilfully avoids the immobilsation of an entire mid by damage to the single vertical wheel. It seems likely that Dr Holt isrightin seeing high medieval water-millers in England as using almost exclusively a Reviews 151 single vertical wheel powering only one set of stones, but he is worryingly unfamtiiar with the other options which were available. SimUarly, on the introduction of the windmdl in the late twelfth century, Dr Holt gives very short shrift indeed to discussion of the origins of this remarkable invention beyond the claims of Bloch, Bauters and Bautier for France or Flanders. Holt, who yields to noone in national fervour, prefers native English genius without any more searching enquiry further afield. His analysis of how windmills were introduced over the thirteenth century to supersede or supplement water-mills in areas especially in the east of England, where river flow was undependable or sluggish, is a useful contribution, which would have been enhanced by some maps. Dr. Holt's treatment of seigneurial interest in mills and the varying ways in which a lord could exploit this vital resource is well documented and skilfully andysed for the thirteenth century, but he fails to recognise the increasing significance of privately owned mills constructed by peasant proprietors paying the lord a rent for the site and, if relevant, for a water-diversion. A similar process took place in the late Middle Ages in the construction of water-mills for fulling cloth. Holt's excursus on the famous Carus-Wilson thesis of an 'industrial revolution' in the thirteenth century based on fulling-mills (pp. 14558 ) is...