Bread has always been a dietary staple in England. Today bread is mass-produced and the majority of us in England buy our bread from the supermarkets. However, despite being a dietary staple, consumption of bread has decreased over the centuries. In the past bread, along with other grain-based staples such as ale and oatmeal, comprised a significantly higher proportion of people’s diets. These grain-based products were not mass-made but produced on a small scale in each locality.
A key part of the production process was the milling of grain, turning wheat and rye into fine flour, coarsely grinding malted barley for brewing, and loosely grinding oats for oatmeal. Mills were therefore a focal point of each community.
Most milling was done in local water, wind, and horse mills, but some milling was also conducted with human power using domestic hand-mills. However, because of the largely domestic nature of hand-milling, historians have struggled to uncover how this particular segment of the milling industry functioned.
Hand-milling in England
Insights into domestic milling are only possible when the use of hand-mills came into conflict with more established water and windmills, which claimed a monopoly over grinding grain in a local area, and the case ended up in court. Previous work on mills has been concentrated on the pre-1500 period and examined cases at local courts. Our research focuses on records from the Court of Exchequer, which begin in 1558 and provide much more in-depth and circumstantial evidence than records from other courts. In the 1258 legal cases examined in the project so far, 10% feature hand-mills.
The majority of people using hand-mills were brewers, alehouse and innkeepers, and maltsters engaged in the malting and sale of barley. These were important customers for mills, as they milled great quantities of malt and therefore provided greater profit. In Leicestershire, it was claimed that the rental value of the lord’s watermill had declined from £51 to £35 per annum ‘because several of the inhabitants … have lately sett upp private Quernes & mills’.
Like the bigger water and windmills, hand-mills operated using a set of millstones. The upper stone was rotated, using a handle, against the lower stone and the grain ground between them. There was no standard size hand-mill and outputs varied. Bedfordshire maltster William Faldo stated that his hand-mill was ‘not much bigger then a mustard quearne’ [quern being another term for a hand-mill]. In contrast, Nottinghamshire gentleman John Trueman deposed that his ‘father did Build a little house to sett the said Querne in … called by the name of the Quernhouse’, suggesting a much larger machine.
Hand-mills therefore often required installation in homes. In Northamptonshire, millwright Robert Eyre deposed that, since coming to the area, he ‘hath made divers of the Quernes there for the inhabitants of the same Towne’. Millwrights were therefore required to set up smaller hand-mills as well as larger water and windmills. Millers and millwrights were also vital in maintaining hand-mills, the stones of which required skilled cutting. In a Derbyshire case, it was stated that the millers of the local water and windmills came to ‘pick dress and Cleanse the stones’ of inhabitant’s hand-mills in return for a fee. This demonstrates significant cross-over in the trades and labour required for industrial and domestic milling.
It has been suggested by historians that hand-mills were predominantly used by women as part of unpaid domestic labour. Whilst we have evidence of women operating hand-mills most evidence suggests they were operated by paid servants and male labourers. In Devon, two male deponents stated that they had been employed by a maltster ‘in making of mault’ at his hand-mill. Similarly in Nottinghamshire, Elizabeth Horner deposed that anyone using her father’s hand-mill paid a penny per load ‘to the labouring persons that ground the same’. In Lancashire and Derbyshire, it was ‘servants’ who worked their master or mistresses’ hand-mill. In Reading it was claimed that Mr Sutton, a maltster, used child labour, setting ‘girls & boyes on worke about grinding mault in his house & gave them a penny a day & meat & drinke for their labour’. Alongside female, unpaid domestic work, these depositions suggest that hand-milling was not purely unpaid subsistence work but part of the wider economy too.
Change over time?
The domestic milling sector has often been seen as static. However, there was a technological change towards the end of the seventeenth century. From the 1670s ‘steel hand mills’ appear in the litigation, described by one litigant as ‘an instrument … for grinding of malt onely without water, stone or any such necessaryes’ – much simpler machines. The use of steel for mills is more readily associated with industrial roller milling in the nineteenth century, with the use of steel hand-mills largely overlooked in the historiography.
The description of grinding for ‘malt onely’ further links hand-mills to the brewing trade and these mills may have been deemed better suited for that purpose than industrial mills. In a case from 1716 it was stated that ‘malt so ground at their said steel milnes was esteemed to be much better Ground and fitter for the Brewers use then what was ordinarily ground at any water corne milne’.
Steel hand-mills required less expertise to set up and were even more moveable than their traditional millstone counterparts. Deposing in 1706, Yorkshire widow Elizabeth Kent provided some information about the production and retail of steel mills. She stated that her husband had been ‘an Iron monger and sold steel mills’ at his ‘shopp’, suggesting that the mills did not require installation by a professional but were sold ready to go. However, the steel mills did require maintenance. In a Derbyshire case, it is revealed that a local ‘Smyth’ [blacksmith] was ‘Imployed to fyle and mend the said Steele mill when out of order’. Therefore, those involved in the manufacture and retail of metal goods were important figures in this new era of domestic milling.
Conclusions
Hand-mills made up a significant domestic milling sector in England. However, this domestic sector was closely tied to and frequently came into conflict with the industrial milling sector. Litigation concerning hand-mills can provide insights into household working patterns and provisioning, as well as the politics and economics of the milling industry as a whole.
Mabel Winter
The Politics of the English Grain Trade, 1314-1815 