Ecclesiastical Lordship, Seigneurial Power and the Commercialization of Milling in Medieval England by Adam Lucas (review)

Adam Lucas has been working on the history of mills of all technological sorts – water, wind, tide, horse, and hand – as well as the categories into which they fall, for many years as a follower of Richard Holt and John Langton whom he thanks profusely in his acknowledgements. This book should be regarded as a sequel to his earlier work, Wind, Water, Work: Ancient and Medieval Milling Technology (Brill, 2006), and is difficult to read without reference back to it. He has summarised his present argument in ‘The Role of the Church in the English Milling Trade, 1086–1540’ (available through academia.edu) which makes his position vis à vis the different schools of thought clear. Although he sees the motivation for monastic interest in mills as complex and as varying over time, his own theory, which largely dismisses any idea of monastic care for their tenants, also explains why he avoids some works that one might otherwise expect to find, such as Joshua Getzler’s A History of Water Rights at Common Law (Oxford University Press, 2004).

Lucas’s concentration on mills is justified. At different periods, religious houses managed nearly 50 per cent of all known mills, the portion of their income that the returns represented was considerable, and they were an important source of cash. Unfortunately, he evidently cannot relate the return to the monastery from the mill to the probable area of land or clientele it serviced and there is little indication of the capacity of the mill itself. These are questions that might be relevant to the degree of satisfaction owner, miller, and customer felt and explain the nature of any litigation.

Circumstances have limited Lucas to published material, which accounts for the suggestion that Inquisitions Post Mortem end in 1422. His lack of access to manuscripts such as ecclesiastical, manorial, or royal court records leaves some queries about the nature of otherwise unrecorded lawsuits. Among the extensive published cartularies he has chosen twenty-one religious houses as a sample for detailed study that he hopes provide a balanced coverage of the different religious orders, their size, and location. He has studied four Benedictine, nine Augustinian, five Cistercian, and five ‘other’ orders for the evidence of monastic attitudes to mills.

Lucas sets this detailed study after a survey of the introduction and spread of the different orders, their relationship to their patrons, their management of their estates, and the development of feudal land tenure. He does not look closely at the various recensions of Magna Carta and the charter relating to royal forests where the rights of patrons and donors over abbeys are set and so apparently misses the clause that prohibits monasteries from taking lands from a donor and leasing them back to him, a clause that casts light on some of their previous behaviour.

He accepts that commercialisation, as defined by R. H. Britnell, was happening but does not see it as a forerunner of the Industrial Revolution. He then devotes a chapter to the bishoprics and archbishoprics before examining each of the monastic orders in turn in terms of their overall wealth, the level of their seigneurial authority, the geographical location of their properties, and their interest in commercial exploitation. His detailed examination of each of the mills in his sample is punctilious if frustrating as he rarely discusses the whole of the resources the house had in the area. Sometimes these could be illuminating but apart from places where any dispute over mills is evidently related to the attempts of the monastery to dominate a town – at Cirencester and St Albans, for instance – we get little background. His information is patchy so that we can rarely know who built any particular mills or what it cost, although it is probable the expenditure would require considerable resources. Lucas offers occasional estimates of the cost of maintenance...