The Miller in Eighteenth-Century Virginia / An Account of Mills & the Craft of Milling, as Well as a Description of the Windmill near the Palace in Williamsburg

An Account of Mills & the Craft of Milling, as well as a Description of the Windmill near the Palace in Williamsburg
Williamsburg Craft Series
WILLIAMSBURG Published by Colonial Williamsburg MCMLXXVIII
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.