Thomas K. Ford

THE OLD MILL STREAM OF HISTORY

PUTTING THE WIND TO WORK

INDIAN CORN AND COLONIAL MILLS

WHERE TOBACCO WAS KING

HOW WAS IT IN WILLIAMSBURG?

MILLING AND THE VIRGINIA PLANTERS

ALL THAT THE LAW ALLOWS

THE SAID WILLIAM ROBERTSON'S WIND MILL ...

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

Transcriber's Notes

An Account of Mills & the Craft of Milling, as well as a Description of the Windmill near the Palace in Williamsburg

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Williamsburg Craft Series

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WILLIAMSBURG
Published by Colonial Williamsburg
MCMLXXVIII

The Miller in Eighteenth-Century Virginia

The reader of this account, being of open mind and charitable disposition, as good men and women have ever been, will readily recognize that whatever may appear in these pages to the discredit of millers in times past cannot be taken to reflect in any fashion upon the present master of Mr. Robertson’s windmill. Indeed, the age-old repute of the calling is as distasteful to him and his colleagues of today as it would be inappropriate if applied to them.

Unhappily, it cannot be denied that millers of an earlier day—those of Chaucer’s generation, for example—left something to be desired in the way of scruple. That gifted storyteller and honest reporter of the age in which he lived gave prominent place in his Canterbury Tales to two millers. One of these was the villain and ultimate victim in the Reeve’s Tale: “A thief he was, forsooth, of corn and meal; And sly at that, accustomed well to steal.”

The other miller of the Canterbury Tales was himself one of the pilgrims, as merry and uncouth a rogue as one could find in any band of cathedral-bound penitents: “He could steal corn and full thrice charge his tolls; and yet he had a thumb of gold, begad.” That last remark, an allusion to the proverb that “every honest miller has a thumb of gold,” cut a broad swath indeed. Only Chaucer’s own regard for truth could have moved him thus to dignify the popular belief that among millers integrity was as rare as twenty-four-carat thumbs.

Similar distrust can be discerned in early feudal and manorial laws in England, which prescribed certain methods of operation for grist millers and established corresponding penalties for violation. The miller was directed to charge specified tolls for his services, and no more. The lord of the manor got his grain ground “hopper free,” since he generally owned the mill and held the local milling monopoly. Under the thirteenth-century Statute of Bakers, chartered land-holders paid the miller one-twentieth of the grain he ground for them, and tenants-at-will gave one-sixteenth, while bondsmen and laborers had to part with one-twelfth of what they brought to the mill.

The same law also required that the miller’s “toll-fat” (or dish) and “sceppum” (or scoop) used to measure grain be accurate. The manorial seal on a measure testified that it had been compared with the standard measure and found exact. But millers in all lands and times (the present excepted, of course) have been adept at finding ways to outwit law and customer at the same time.

A method popular among some millers was to build square housings for the millstones, thus providing four innocent corners in which quite a bit of meal could collect. The more artful members of the craft built a concealed spout that carried a small proportion of the meal to a private bin while the visible spout delivered the bulk of it to the customer’s container.

Other stratagems, too varied and too numerous to list here, testify to the craftiness of many millers. The lengths to which the law went in trying to keep up can be seen in an English statute of 1648. This law, closing one loophole through which a miller could levy a hidden toll, allowed him to keep no hogs, ducks, or geese in the neighborhood of the mill, and no more than three hens and a cock.

All of this ingenuity, most of the popular suspicions of the milling craft, and some of the legal restrictions consequent upon both, crossed the Atlantic along with the millers and millwrights who came to the colonies. More details of this in a moment; meantime, what of the mill that belonged to the man that owned the name of rascal?