ABSTRACT
The legal status of mills and milling in medieval England is as difficult to disentangle as any of the intractable problems in medieval history. The owners of mills with suit had certain rights over the unfree tenants covered by the obligation, albeit according to local custom and tradition, rather than common law. From the late twelfth century onward, mills and their incomes increasingly regarded as valuable assets needed to be protected from encroachment, alienation and competition. Suit of mill was not simply an irksome imposition for those people in medieval and early modern England who were subject to it. A very different picture is presented by those non-seigneurial mills granted by knights to the Augustinians, Cistercians and Premonstratensians between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. All of the cases highlight the importance which ecclesiastical estates attached to mills, not only as physical pieces of equipment which occupied diverse and sometimes contested landscapes, but secure sources of both revenue and seigneurial power.
