Watermills and windmills

The story

Grinding by hand was hard work

To make bread you need flour, and to make flour you have to grind grain. For thousands of years, at home, this was done by hand: the grain was crushed between two stones, one fixed and one that was turned. It was long, tiring work, often done by women and slaves, and after hours of effort it produced little flour. A family might spend many hours every day grinding, just to have bread for the next day.

The ancient Romans already knew the watermill: a wheel that turns, pushed by the current of a river, and that, through a series of gears, moves the millstone. But it was in the Middle Ages that this machine really spread, across the whole of Europe. Around the year 1000, every village near a stream wanted its own mill.

A thousand mills in England

An extraordinary document lets us see how widespread they were: the Domesday Book, the great register that King William the Conqueror had compiled in England in 1086 to count the lands and goods of the kingdom. It lists about five thousand six hundred watermills, in a country that perhaps had a couple of million inhabitants: roughly one mill for every fifty families.

The mill usually belonged to the local lord or to a monastery. The peasants were obliged to use it and to pay part of their flour for the service, a charge called “multure”; they could not grind at home. It was not unusual for quarrels to arise between the miller, who had a reputation for cheating, and his customers.

From water to wind

Where there were no fast rivers, for example on plains, on coasts, in the Low Countries or in eastern England, another force was found: the wind. Windmills appeared in Europe in the second half of the 12th century; the first certain evidence, in England and north-western Europe, dates from around 1180-1190. They were built of wood, with sails that turned on their axle. The whole mill rested on a big post and could be turned by hand, to put the sails into the wind.

Later, tide mills also spread, in which the sea, as it rose and fell, filled and emptied a basin that drove the wheel. They were used in Venice, in England and in Spain. On the great rivers, such as the Po and the Tiber, floating mills appeared, built on top of moored boats.

The miller's work was not simple. He had to choose the right stone, adjust the distance between the two millstones so that the flour was neither too coarse nor too fine, and keep the wheel in good condition. The noise of the mill, wheels, gears and millstones, could be heard from far away, and the mill was also a place where people met and exchanged news.

Not just flour

The great discovery was that the water wheel could also drive other machines. With a camshaft, that is, an axle with teeth that lift and let fall a hammer, people made trip-hammers for beating iron, fulling mills for beating and felting wool cloth, saws for cutting logs, bellows for forges, machines for working paper and leather, and presses for oil. In Europe whole towns, such as Fabriano for paper, grew rich thanks to the energy of water.

In the Low Countries, from the 1400s, windmills were also used to pump water off the low-lying land, winning new fields from the sea, the polders.