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From Quern to Computer; a history of flour milling by Martin and Sue Watts covers a wide range of topics and Chapter 14 is particularly interesting. The importance of bread in the early medieval period is highlighted by the Old English words for lord (hlaford) and lady (hloefdige), meaning loaf keeper and loaf kneader respectively. Payments and rents were…
Stephen Buckland George Packham was an English miller and millwright who made his name in France in the early 19th century. He became a friend of Louis-Philippe I, a king whose reign was destined to be short lived. This is an abridged version of an unpublished paper on Packham by Stephen Buckland (1935-2006), which is…
In the last few months this newsletter has featured several articles about the Montefiore Windmill in Jerusalem, which was built by the firm Holman Brothers of Canterbury. This newsletter delves deeper into the history of the firm. Holman Brothers was a Canterbury firm founded in 1816 by John Holman. Originally millwrights, they built smock mills…
One of the main ways we provide access to our archives is through our images and documents catalogue, which you can access here: https://catalogue.millsarchive.org/In this newsletter we have put together some guidance about what the site contains and how you can use it. What does the catalogue include? In our archival collections we hold a wide…
John Munnings (1916-1987) was the nephew of the famous artist Sir Alfred Munnings (1878-1959), and like his uncle before him he was born and raised at Mendham Mill, Suffolk, where his father was the miller. Mendham watermill in Suffolk, photograph by Peter Dolman, 1975(Mills Archive Collection, DOLM-1123588) Munnings fought in the Second World War and was…
Elizabeth Trout This article was originally published in our blog on 31 October 2019.Last week, Tom, one of our dedicated volunteers, found amongst the press cuttings, a piece of card upon which were written a few scrappy handwritten notes. He saw the word ‘mill’ and a date of 1549. Knowing that I like a mystery,…
Millwrighting has been on the Heritage Craft Association Red List of Endangered Crafts since 2019. Without increased opportunities and interest for millwrighting in Britain, the number of mills will slowly decline. To bring the craft into the public eye and highlight its importance in the preservation of our milling heritage, we have put together an…
Vincent Pargeter In a recent newsletter we shared the history of the Montefiore Windmill which was built by the Holmans of Kent. Vincent Pargeter, who worked on the restoration of the mill, wrote up an account of his experiences (originally published in Mill News, Oct 2012 and Jan 2013). This is an abridged version. The…
‘Mill people’ images Mills have often been a popular theme for artworks, ranging from realistic depictions to some of the more unusual symbolic and allegorical uses of milling imagery. There are not many mill images however which are as strange as the ones shown here. For want of a better term we could call them…
From Quern to Computer; a history of flour milling by Martin and Sue Watts covers a wide range of topics and this summarises Chapter 13. The domestication of wild cereal plants in the eastern Mediterranean some 8,000-10,000 years ago led to, or indeed may even have been caused by, an increased consumption of cereal-based products which could…
