FHS Feb 24: A Millennium of Mills and Milling

FDLHS - Report - February 2024

Robin Drury -  A Millennium of Mills and Milling – A Potted History of Windmills and Watermills

Mr Drury’s talk on mills was tightly focused geographically on Sudbury. His time span was enormous, from before the Romans to the demise of the local mill in the late nineteenth century. He showed how a few brand names only survive until today, and then only as a result of diversification.

Robin revealed a remarkably equidistant distribution of the mills along the Stour, which he attributed their use of Roman weirs built to improve navigability on a notoriously shallow river. It would be interesting to see this thesis tested by comparison of mills on other rivers. Almost all of the mills discussed were recorded in the Domesday Book.

These local watermills suffered a variety of fates. A few have been demolished. Others still have commercial uses such as the Mill Hotel in Sudbury. Most have been turned into homes, some with sensitivity toward the historic buildings, others less so. Some had famous residents ranging from the poet Edmund Blunden at Hall Mill, Long Melford, to Derek Taylor, publicist to the ‘Fab Four’ and one of the many called the ‘fifth Beatle’, at Brundon Mill.

A sadly all too short part of the talk covered wind mills, but astonished at the number in and around Sudbury. Mr Drury also explained the excellent but neglected late eighteenth century house at 48 North Street as having been the home of the owner of two windmills in Sudbury, one of which stood just across the road.

The end for these mills came suddenly when an East Anglian farmer’s son, John George Cranfield, went to Minneapolis, saw steam powered steel roller mills, and brought this new technology back in the 1880s to a mill on Ipswich docks. It was so efficient that to keep it running, cheap grain had to be imported from the wheat lands of North America.

Stephen Astley