Stogumber's Watermills

Water mills were probably first brought to this country by the Anglo Saxons, but the first written reference to any mills in the parish comes in the Domesday survey of 1086. The extract shown records two mills at Combe and Hartrow.

The entry for Combe, now Combe Sydenham, records that the mill was ‘sine censu’ or without value. In other words it produced no income for its lord.

That at Hartrow was recorded with an income of 6d per annum.

To put that in context nationally, the lowest rent in the country was in Dorset at 3d, but the highest in Cambridgeshire was £6. The nearby mill at Torre was valued at 10 shillings.

Domesday does not tell us anything else about the mills in the 11th Century including where exactly they were located.

This illustration from a 14th Century prayer book gives us some idea of what such buildings might have looked like.

The picture shows a single storey, thatched, and wattle and daub built structure, with iron hinges and a lock indicating the value of the contents.

The mill wheel and pond is to the right, and at the extreme right can be seen eels swimming into eel traps. Eels and other payments in kind were taken as payment or part payment for rent.

1796 map

This map dated 1796 shows the two mills clearly.

That at the bottom right survives and is known as Curdon Mill. By this stage both were worked by the same miller and one operated as a grist mill (for animal feed). The mill at the top left is no longer in existence.

The old mill pond

The now dry mill pond is all that remain of this mill which was first recorded in the 14th Century.

The second part of this presentation deals with the role of fulling mills in the cloth industry.

This is a picture of a man walking, or tucking / tooking, or fulling cloth taken from a stained glass window. Fulling both cleaned cloth and shrunk it making it denser or thicker.

Fulling was a manual task performed in this manner until about the 13th century.

Fullers were organised into guilds, a cross between a trade association and a trade union. Operating in this way enabled their members to maintain strict control over the numbers who were engaged in the trade, and so they were able to keep the prices charged for their service high. Fullers and their guilds operated in towns

Inside the 19th century machinery was untouched when the author visited. The drive wheel is on the left of the photograph, situated immediately behind the water wheel which is on the other side of the wall.

Two mill stones are set set just below first floor level to the right of the light bulb, and adjacent to a chute through which ground animal feed would have been directed into sacks.

The wheel itself was not in such a good state having lain dormant and outside for several decades. It was an impressively proportioned piece of equipment being approximately 14 foot in diameter and is made of cast iron. It would have been able to drive the millstones at a speed of around 150 rpm producing in excess of 3cwt of feed per hour.

Escot Farm has a similar watermill in the stone building pictured.

The wheel was detached from the machine room located in the stone building, and was connected to it by a drive shaft.

The wheel itself is now obscured by ivy but is still in place at the open side of the corrugated barn.

It measures diameter 14ft 6 inch and width 3ft 1inch, with a gearing ratio 1:10. The water was supplied to the top of the wheel along a metal conduit which runs just below the rear eaves of the open building. This was itself fed from a series of ponds which are still in evidence in the fields above Escott.

The late Mr Sellick could remember the water wheel in use when he was a boy at the farm, but his was the last generation that would have been able to remember such watermills. In the early decades of the last century they were superseded by the internal combustion engine and then by electrically driven machines