ABSTRACT
Mills were among the most ubiquitous, versatile and powerful of medieval technologies. Archaeological evidence, supplemented by the witness of legal treatises, suggests that watermills – with both horizontal waterwheels requiring simple gearing and vertical waterwheels requiring more complicated engineering – and water management systems were in use in many parts of the Roman Empire in antiquity and remained so in some jurisdictions during the early Middle Ages. 2 The more numerous documentary sources available for areas of western Christendom from the tenth or eleventh centuries can be extrapolated to postulate the existence of tens of thousands of watermills in this region by the twelfth century, with further growth in their numbers until about 1300, with windmills also being in common use by the later thirteenth century. 3 The type and location of mills was shaped by technological developments such as the apparently twelfth-century invention of the vertical windmill, as well as by the facts of human and physical geography. In Britain, for example, both on Hospitaller and other estates, windmills were more numerous in the flatter, drier and relatively windy east, with watermills dominating elsewhere. In the Aegean, with its many small, windy islands lacking year-round watercourses, the windmill was probably in more general use than the water version, at least by the fifteenth century. Similarly, the number of mills and the purposes to which they were put were shaped by the size of the local population, its dietary requirements and the nature of local industry. Mills were set aside for fulling cloth in England and the Low Countries, for draining mines and crushing ore in central Europe and elsewhere, and for sugar production in the Latin, and non-Latin, East.
