By the top of the medieval interval millers had poor reputations. Chaucer’s miller within the Canterbury Tales was coarse, vulgar, and habitually dishonest – he instructed ‘tavern tales, filthy in the principle’ and was ‘a master-hand at stealing grain’. These stereotypes have forged an extended shadow, reiterated in jest books, which described the collar of a miller’s shirt as ‘valiant … As a result of that everie morning it had a Thief by the neck’, and ballads, the place lecherous millers had been outfoxed by girls who refused to marry ‘a Thief and a Miller’. However how did this stereotype come about?
Diets in early trendy England had been grain-based, consisting largely of bread, porridge, and beer. Earlier than bakers, brewers, and house owners might produce them, their grain needed to be floor. Floor grain was fast to spoil, so grinding companies needed to be native, and each group due to this fact required a mill and miller. Regardless of their ubiquity their enterprise was so mundane as to go unrecorded and so they left few private data. Nonetheless, milling was regulated, and infringements of excellent apply had been tried at native and nationwide courts, notably the Court docket of Exchequer – the data of which provide perception into the milling enterprise and people behind the service.
A standard accusation in opposition to millers in litigation was that they took extreme toll – a share of consumers’ grain taken as cost – which had a major impression on family financial system. Subsequently, it’s unsurprising that the stereotypical miller, as exemplified within the ballad ‘Robin the Plow-man’s Braveness’ (1675-96), was a ‘double Knave in grain’, who ‘out of a bushel a peck he’ll steal’. Some millers actually had been dishonest, accused at legislation of taking ‘one other toll dyshfull’ of grain or, extra subtly, as was the case at Merford Mill in 1630s Denbigh, creating a spot within the mill equipment via which grain might be ‘hid and purloined’.
Their work not often led to wealth, but in ballads akin to ‘The Witty Damsel of Devonshire’ (1675-96) millers had been described as having ‘three or 4 Acres of Land,/ And in addition good Silver and Gold at command’ as typically as they had been ‘lowlie’ and ‘impolite’, taking part in with the notion that they cheated of their commerce. Millers who acted above their station obtained their comeuppance. Dick the miller in ‘Sick-gotten Items seldome thrive’ (1647-65), for instance, purchased a ‘gallant Swimsuit of Garments’ with the triple toll he’d taken solely to have them stolen by a crafty ‘Lasse’ whom he tried to seduce.
In actuality, a miller’s wealth trusted the world the mill served, whether or not the mill had land which might be farmed, whether or not there have been competing mills close by, and whether or not it was the customary mill which native tenants and inhabitants had been obliged to make use of. They not often owned mills themselves, however rented them or had been employed by lords or landowners. They thus discovered themselves serving two opposing masters – the mill house owners, who anticipated important income and demanded excessive charges, and the communities the millers served, who anticipated an environment friendly and inexpensive service – and so grew to become simple targets for accusations of malpractice. In Bovey Tracey, Devon, in a 1601 dispute between competing mills, John Coles claimed that the millers of the manor mills had ‘taken extreme toll’ as a result of the mills had been ‘att a verie excessive Hire’ which they might solely make via ‘unjust meanes’.
Mills had been dominated by males. Only some girls, principally widows, labored mill equipment themselves. Nonetheless, girls had been typically prospects: in authorized depositions males described sending grain to the mill through their wives or servants reasonably than taking it themselves. Gilbert Jacson of Grantham, Lincolnshire, claimed within the 1580s that he by no means dealt straight with the mill ‘however dedicated the dealing therein whollye to his wyfe’, and within the 1620s John Newton solely had information of poor service at Burton upon Trent mills due to stories from his ‘spouse and maidservant’. This meant that interactions at mills had been typically between male employees and feminine prospects. Together with their remoted location, this made mills the proper setting for tales of illicit assignations – which frequently made use of the metaphorical potential of the commerce. In ‘The Lusty Miller’s Recreation’ (1672-96) a lady sends her three daughters to the mill with grist, every of whom falls ‘beneath the Stones with a lot pleasure’ and returns with ‘her Stomach as full as her Sack’. In ‘Grist Floor at Final’ (c.1685) a feminine buyer, Molly, finds the miller forlorn as he can’t make his mill ‘obey’, and so takes ‘the matter in hand’ and helps his ‘stones go spherical’ to get her grist ‘floor apace’.
The truth of interactions between millers and their neighbours, nevertheless, was depending on interpersonal relationships and obligations, which maintained the extension of credit score upon which the cash-poor early trendy financial system relied. Millers used mutual obligation to draw grist to their mills, normally on the expense of a close-by mill, which frequently resulted in authorized motion meant to stop their rivals from working. In 1620s Selby, Yorkshire, a miller was stated to have turn out to be ‘properly acquainted’ with house owners of public homes to ‘oblige’ them ‘to carry their corne to his mill to grind’ reasonably than the manor mill. Millers’ reputations additionally relied on financial credit score. In the same dispute in Leominster within the 1600s, a shoemaker’s spouse defined that her refusal to make use of the manorial mill was as a result of the miller didn’t ‘purchase his shooes with my husband’.
The stereotypical early trendy miller light with industrialisation and urbanisation. By the nineteenth century giant steam mills had been changing water and windmills, increasing transport networks conveyed finer flour over a lot larger distances, and millers grew to become merchant-millers, shopping for grain wholesale and promoting the produce on to retailers and bakers. Not poked enjoyable at for group infractions, millers provoked new ire as industrial capitalists.
Mabel Winter is a Postdoctoral Analysis Affiliate on ‘The Politics of the English Grain Commerce’ venture on the College of Oxford.
