CHAPTER VIII.
Every manor had its mill, and consequently there is hardly a village without one. The lord of the manor had certain rights over the mill and over his tenants, who were required to go to his mill and to no other.
The mill is usually a very picturesque adjunct to the scenery. It is frequently an old building; it has ancient trees standing round it; there is the mill-pool, the sluice, the wheel, and the foaming waters discharged over it.
The miller himself is a genial figure, dusted with flour, his face lighted up with the consciousness that though all the rest of the parish may starve, that will not he.
And the miller's cottage is almost always scrupulously clean and well-kept. I have known many mills, but I never knew a slattern among miller's wives, never saw a hug-a-mug condition of affairs in the miller's home.
The miller anciently did not stand over-well with the rest of the villagers. He ground the corn of the farmer and the gleanings of the poor, and took his toll from each sack, his fist full and more than his due, so it was said. The millers thumb was a big thumb, and his fist had a large grip.
But it was not only that the miller was supposed to take more than his due of grain, he was suspected of taking what was not his from the lips of the girls and wives who came with their sacks of corn to the mill to have it ground. The element of jealousy of the miller breaks out in a great many country songs. The good nature, the joviality, the cleanness of the miller, no doubt made him a persona grata to the fair sex in a village, and those who could not rival him revenged themselves in lame poems and halting song.
But for all that he was regarded with suspicion, there was a sense of something picturesque, romantic about the miller. He was a type of the genial, self-reliant Englishman; and the writer of the well-known song of the Miller of Dee hit him off to a nicety:—