Stogumber's Watermills
One thousand years of water power.
The parish of Stogumber has had water-powered machines and buildings to house them for around a thousand years.
Although there are many historical references to mills in the parish, it is surprisingly difficult to pinpoint their exact location. Sometimes they are referred to in the historical records by their owner or tenant with no indication where the mill might be; sometimes they are named after a place but it is not clear where that place is - for example Whitemoor; and sometimes they are named after a place but the place is not where we would expect - for example there was a Stogumber mill in Curdon.
This presentation does not deal with the detailed individual histories of particular mills, but looks broadly at the role that water power has played in the life of the parish. It is broken down into three sections:
My thanks to the mill owners who allowed me access to their properties and passed on their knowledge. All of the properties featured in these slides are private and closed to the public.
Water Power and Food Production
Domesday Book
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.
Watermill illustration in the Luttrell Psalter
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.
Mill stones
Flour mills required hard stones which did not break up as they rubbed against each other - this was to avoid stone grit being mixed in with the flour produced.
Local stone was not up to the task. Millstones were imported from the Forest of Dean and probably from further afield as well.
They had to be periodically re-grooved or dressed which was a skilled task undertaken by a millwright.
Eventually they became too worn to be of use and now turn up in some surprising places…..
A fragment in the village pond
and in a flowerbed
A decorative lintel at Hartrow Manor
Curdon Mill
Lease of 1325 for Curdon Mill
The earliest detailed record of a mill in the parish is housed at the Somerset Record Office and is a lease for the rent of a mill in Curdon dated 1325.
It is only a few lines long but tells an enormous amount about life in the parish at the time.
This type of lease was written in duplicate - one part for the lessee and one for the lessor. It was then cut in two in such a way that marrying the two parts together could prove the copy which each party held was the original. It reads as follows:
Lease for life of Joan of a watermill, watercourse and 1½ roods of land in the waterleats at Corunden next to the tenement of Agatha la Hert, to hold with mulcture of Joan's tenants at Capyton, Estcot and Corundon reserving to Joan the watercourse when it is necessary to water the waterleats.
Rent 1 4/7d a year and 22 geese on Lammas Day for the land also to grind Joan's corn free of toll.
The lease was between a landlady called Joan, and two men who agreed to rent the mill for a payment of part cash and part payment in kind.
As well as agreeing to the lease on the mill itself, the lease also specifies that they have the right to use the water to drive the mills – except when Joan herself needs it to water her watermeadows. The manor court records for Stogumber do not survive, but other records both locally and nationally are full of disputes arising about rights to use water courses.
The lessees also acquired a guaranteed flow of customers for their mill – this is the system of mulcture whereby tenants were obliged to use their landlord's mill and none other.
This was not necessarily their cheapest or best option and mulcture was understandably deeply unpopular, as were millers themselves who were widely seen as greedy and dishonest
This system of mulcture explains why there were two mills rather than one at the hamlet of Curdon: one was owned by the manor of Rowden as we have just seen, and the other was owned by Stogumber manor (this is the property now known as Curdon Mill and is NOT the one detailed in this lease). Each would have had a separate supply of customers associated with their particular manor.
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.
Water Power & Cloth Production
Fulling
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
Fulling mill mechanism
Fulling was automated in the 13th century using water power.
The process was very simple as this diagram illustrates: the water wheel was used to raise a large hammer which then fell when released onto the cloth
Although a simple process this was revolutionary as it was the first process in cloth manufacture to be mechanised – several hundred years before the invention of the spinning wheel, or the later mechanisation developed during the industrial revolution.
Some have even claimed that this was the first ever powered industrial process.
Moreover this invention helped transform the relationship between town and country since fulling mills were sited in country areas rather than town.
The guilds of fullers were very opposed to this as might be expected, and this is illustrated by this extract from their rule book from 1346.
It is ordained that no man cause to be taken out of the town any kind of cloth to be fulled on pain of being fined 40 pence for each cloth, and that no man shall receive cloth which is fulled in open country on pain of the aforesaid.
Historians now believe that the water powered fulling industry developed in the countryside to avoid the restrictions imposed by the urban guilds. Towns such as Bristol were badly hit by the loss of trade which was occasioned by the move, because as fulling migrated so also did other associated cloth production processes such as dyeing.
The countryside was no longer just an area of primary production but was transformed into a value-added economy, contributing to and benefiting from the boom in cloth exports during the 15th and 16th centuries.
Wealth no longer was just a function of land holding, and trading and manufacturing families such as the Sweetings of Hartrow , and the Dashwoods of Vellow Wood began to establish themselves
Northam Mill
Northam Mill was first recorded in 1568 as a fulling mill. The present mill building is of later construction and has no trace of the mill workings or water course. However, the wheel was sited on the wall where the outside stairs are now situated.
Northam is typical of mill buildings in the parish as it is set into the hillside – this is the rear of the building and on the other, downhill side it is two storeys.
Buildings were sited in this way in order to ensure that water was delivered to the top of the millwheel, so that the weight of the water could then be utilised to drive the wheel forward.
The streams in the parish are very small and the flow of the water itself would not be sufficient to drive a wheel; it was the use of the water in conjunction with gravity that provided sufficient power to drive the machinery. To this end water had to be stored in mill ponds and then released when needed.
Stogumber Mill
The way in which this was done is still evident at Stogumber mill, first recorded in the 14th century.
The mill is tucked away by the stream in the bottom left of the photograph, but it draws its water supply from near the centre of the village higher up and about half a mile away.
As the stream drops, the water supply is channeled at a progressively and comparatively higher level until it reaches the mill pond pictured.
This photograph shows the sluice from the other side of the dam wall. The area in front is the now infilled wheel pit
Decline of local cloth and flour industries
There were at least seven fulling mills in the parish and possibly more.
Each would have been associated with nearby wooden racks on which cloth was hung to be stretched and dried after it had been fulled.
Much of the economic life of the community was centered on the cloth trade and Stogumber can best be thought of as perhaps an industrial or semi-industrial community rather than a quiet agricultural backwater. Although they do not provide the only reason, fulling mills were a central reason for the location of Britain's premier industry in areas such as Stogumber.
The cloth trade and fulling industry declined towards the end of the eighteenth century leading to hardship for many.
There may be some evidence for this in Stogumber from the parish accounts which list those in receipt of poor relief. The fourth line down in the document is for 'Tuckmill' which received 4d suggesting that the occupants had fallen on hard times.
Kingswood Mill
The financial problems experienced by fulling mills were soon also experienced by the parish's corn mills such as the one at Kingswood pictured here.
The corn mills difficulties stemmed from the repeal of the corn laws in 1846 which lead to the importation of cheaper corn from the USA. The simultaneous invention of coal-powered, steam-driven roller mills led to the construction of new, larger and more efficient corn grinding mills at the ports.
Small country mills became unviable and Stogumber was no exception: Northam had ceased by 1866, Stogumber by 1886 and Kingswood limped on but was redundant by 1914.
And so the two principal activities of water milling which had been going on for at least 900 years came to an end.
Water Power & Agriculture
New Barn, Higher Vexford
Although it might not look like it this is a picture of a water mill.
It was at New Barn, Higher Vexford. This is typical of a number of mills that were built during the 19th Century just as others were shutting.
The reason for this is that this was a period when farming had its own industrial revolution – or maybe mechanical revolution – when many jobs which had previously been done by man or by beast were mechanised. Steam power, horse power, and water power were used in new ways both in the field and at the farmstead.
Water power was utilised to drive threshing machines, to pulp roots, to cut chaff and to grind animal feed. These mills clearly had to be at the farm. The water wheel is to the right of the building but cannot be seen in this photograph.
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
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
Combe Sydenham Mill
Water power enjoyed a brief renaissance at the end of the 20th Century at Combe Sydenham.
The mill there was restored in the 1980s and ran as a tourist attraction and working mill, grinding corn for use in a quality bread which was sold on a commercial basis.
Inside the machinery is in an excellent state, and is all ready to go, but alas for a variety of reasons this mill ceased production and now, just like its forbear in the Domesday survey, is 'sine censu', without value, producing no income for its owner. Combe Sydenham mill is no longer open to the public.
The use of water power has been central to the life of the parish for a thousand years or so. Who knows, perhaps as interest in alternative energy grows its use may once again be revived ?
Sources
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Holt, R., 'Whose Were the Profits of Corn Milling? An Aspect of the Changing Relationship between the Abbots of Glastonbury and Their Tenants 1086-1350', Past & Present , No. 116 (Aug., 1987) , pp. 3-23.
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Page, W. (Ed.), The Victoria County History of Somerset, V. 2 (London, 1911)
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Primary Sources
Somerset Record Office (SRO)
SRO\DD\WO/44/12/3
SRO\DD\WO/44/11/1
SRO\DD\WO/41/12
SRO\DD\WO/13/1/7
SRO\DD\WO/13/1/3
SRO\DD\WO/13/1
SRO\DD\WO/1/18
SRO\D\P\Stogm/4/1/1 microfiche
SRO\DD\AH/13/1/1
SRO\DD\WO/65/7
SRO\DD\TB/51/2
SRO\DD\SAS/C795/BK/87
SRO\DD\WO/43/1
SRO\DD\WO/42/25
SRO\DD\WO/13/1/6
SRO\DD\WO/13/1/2
SRO\DD\WO/1
SRO\DD\CCH/62
SRO\DD\TB/6/5
SRO\DD\L/2/19/109
SRO\DD\CC/T/10874
SRO L\1324