Agricultural History Review, Volume 54 Part 2 (2006), p. 344

This is a most welcome book. A long-matured work, it is the culmination of some twenty years research that began at the University of Birmingham. Under the inspiring leadership of Rodney Hilton and then principally Christopher Dyer, a succession of postgraduate students pursued themes of largely rural history, firmly based on thorough studies of the copious English manorial documentation and at the same time grounded in an appreciation of the social implications of the nature of the medieval agrarian economy. During the early 1980s Langdon (and subsequently others) turned to the medieval mill as a pre-eminent subject of serious study, with the aim of superseding the then-prevalent – often fanciful – speculations around the significance and the impact of this most obvious example of early mechanization. The present reviewer’s The mills of medieval England (1988) was essentially a broad overview of the questions surrounding the mill, of its chronology and its social implications, and of the evidence. Langdon’s book now brings a depth of research and analysis that allows our earlier models to be tested, confirmed, and generally modified. It is indeed a triumphant and worthy culmination of that long research effort.

Langdon focuses on the later middle ages, a period when the mill was fully-established. By 1300 the English countryside was filled with watermills and (since the late twelfth century) windmills, and in fact their number would soon begin to fall, accompanying the downturn in the population. The very large sample – 333 manorial mill histories each covering the whole period under study – confirms the trends identified in earlier, smaller samples that watermills were in gentle decline both in number and as revenue earners certainly until the middle of the fifteenth century, whilst the windmill entered a more precipitate decline. Fulling mills and other industrial mills held their position through the period, with a notable take-off in the number of industrial mills at the very end of the middle ages. Langdon’s statistical work on a wide range of milling activities goes well beyond such simple analyses, however, and with constant regional breakdowns reflects the complexity of the late medieval economy. The numerous tables and figures reflect how extensive this statistical work was, and are a testimony to the breadth and depth of research that lies behind every chapter of this book.

The mill is interesting in itself as a machine, and there are technical data in plenty. The copious English manorial records often record in astonishing detail the minutiae of the costs of construction and repairs, from which a very full picture of the machines can be drawn, and also of course a fuller appreciation of the technicalities and the financial implications of operating a mill. Langdon uses this matter primarily to support a book which is essentially about the mill in use, about the mill’s economic and social meaning. So this is no narrow technological study that neglects people: the owners and operators of mills, and their customers, receive full and satisfying treatment. The traditional perception of the mill as exclusively a jealously-guarded demesne asset has already been shown to be false, and Langdon fills out and develops the picture of diversity, with a significant number of mills effectively independent of the manor and many others held by tenants on lease. Much information on those who took tenancies is presented, and on those poorer men who actually worked the mills. The question of the relationships the different classes of customer had to these mills is crucial: how did suit of mill, the tenant’s duty to use his lord’s mill, actually work in practice? Langdon’s presentation of copious evidence to demonstrate the practicalities of the situation, and the apparent tendency through much of this period for lords to extend or try to extend their powers in this respect, is only one of the many fascinating sections of the book. Each of his chapters ends with a discussion of the implications of his findings, and (parallel with the presentation of important empirical evidence for how this sector of the medieval economy worked) these discussions, of – for example – technical creativity and technological systems, capital fragmentation and reformulation, and the social interactions of milling, take the reader far into important theoretical considerations with significance well beyond the field of milling.

As Langdon points out in his concluding discussion, his study of milling confirms continuity rather than radical change, consolidation rather than discontinuity. The medieval mill was not an agent of social change, he is saying, but rather milling was yet another activity contributing to the reinforcement of traditional economic and social patterns. Though some historians of technology still favour an ‘industrial revolution of the middle ages’ driven by waterpower and windpower, the medieval mill can be seen in its true colours as a c haracteristic feature of a pre-industrial society.