Millers and Millwrights in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages

Abstract

The study of early watermills has, from its very beginning, concentrated on two issues: their diffusion (in time and space) and their technical construction. Very little interest has been devoted to the persons who built and managed them—the millwrights and the millers. This tendency has been even more manifest from the 1980s onward, when interest has focused more and more on the increasing number of archaeological finds. The written evidence, our almost sole source for people connected with the mills, plays a quite insignificant part in modern scholarship. This short article does not aim at far-reaching conclusions concerning the socioeconomic conditions of the two professions involved. Its main purpose is to show the extent of the evidence actually at hand. The varied nature of this evidence, as well as the uncertain authenticity of parts of it, complicates the study. After a short presentation of the terminology, I start my investigation by presenting the millers according to the three basic socioeconomic areas within which they were working, and end up with a discussion of the millwrights, in order to show how the two occupations were at least partly related.