For uncounted generations in every pre-mechanical civilization grain has been ground in a variety of one-woman-power devices. Pounding with mortar and pestle was one of the earliest and is still the crudest of these devices. The saddlestone-metate device, still to be seen in some areas of Central and South America, substituted a rolling, sliding motion to the upper stone that rubbed and sheared the grain. Finally, the Roman quern, rotating continually in the same direction and shearing the kernels between grooved faces of matched stones, opened the door to the use of natural instead of muscle power.
History does not record the name of the man, probably a Greek, who first harnessed natural power to grind grain between opposing stones. Possibly it happened when his wife handed him the family quern with the command, “Here, you do it!”—in Greek, of course. What he did, instead of earning his bread by the sweat of his brow, was to apply brain power. He fixed a water wheel to the lower end of a vertical shaft and attached the upper end to the upper stone of his handmill. And then, no doubt, he went fishing in the millstream while the flowing water did his work.
In the anonymous Greek’s footsteps, a Roman named Vitruvius made the arrangement more flexible by introducing wooden gearing to transmit the power. Others made further improvements in the slow progress of time until the watermill was a reasonably efficient and widely used machine. The Domesday Book, or census of the year 1080, recorded 5,624 mills in England alone, all operated either by animal or water power.
The identity of the man or men who invented the windmill is also lost in the mists of antiquity—or at least of the Middle Ages. The earliest authenticated reference to a windmill in western Europe refers to one that stood in France about the year 1180. The next known reference dates from 1191 and concerns a windmill in England. Both were post mills, more or less like the reconstructed windmill of William Robertson in Williamsburg. This is the simplest among several types of wind-operated mills and was the type first adopted in Europe, in England generally, and in the colonies.
Anyone who has read much poetry cannot fail to realize that a watermill is by nature a more romantic machine than a windmill. Poets recognize this as a fact, and perhaps non-poets who have spent some well remembered moments down by the old mill stream will agree. But this is not to say that windmills are lacking in emotional appeal and romantic inspiration. Far from it. As Robert Louis Stevenson wrote:
“There are few merrier spectacles than that of many windmills bickering together in a breeze over a woody country, their halting alacrity of movement, their pleasant business of making bread all day with uncouth gesticulations, their air gigantically human, as of a creature half alive, put a spirit of romance into the tame landscape.”
One of the earliest medieval illustrations of a windmill in England is this brass plaque (here redrawn) in St. Margaret’s Church, King’s Lynn, Norfolk. It tells the ancient joke on the good farmer riding to the mill: To relieve his tired horse of the burden, he carried the sack of grain on his own back! Note that the mill was a post mill and that it was slightly head sick.
PUTTING THE WIND TO WORK
A post mill, as its name suggests, perches somewhat like a flagpole-sitter on the end of a sturdy post held upright by a timber framework. The Laws of Oleron, a breezily worded maritime code adopted in England about 1314, stated that “some windmills are altogether held above ground, and have a high ladder; some have their foot in the ground, being, as people say, well affixed.” In the latter case the substructure of timber bracing was not above ground, but was buried in a mound of earth.