The Plan of St. Gall a study of the architecture & economy of & life in a paradigmatic Carolingian monastery |
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MAN-, ANIMAL-, WATER-POWERED?
THE ROMAN TRADITION |
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 | The Plan of St. Gall |  |
MAN-, ANIMAL-, WATER-POWERED?
THE ROMAN TRADITION
Ferdinand Keller referred to the molae of St. Gall as
"hand mills."[472]
Albert Lenoir expressed the same view:
"The place they occupy in the room, as well as the absence
of any sort of motor mechanism in the vicinity, permits no
doubt that these mills were operated by the hand of man."
He felt convinced that they were similar to a type of mill
common among the ancients, which was set in motion by
driving the upper stone on a center spindle with a wooden
bar (fig. 440).[473]
For commercial purposes the Romans used a
larger variation of this type of mill; its size required
the strength of a donkey or horse to turn it, or lacking
such beasts of burden, it was turned by slaves (figs. 441442).
In the first century B.C., these devices found a
powerful rival in the water mill.[474]
Among the Roman water
mills two basic types can be distinguished: the vertical
mill (fig. 443A), in which the millstone is turned by means
of a water paddle attached to the lower end of a vertical
spindle; and the horizontal or "Vitruvian" mill, the type
in which a vertical water wheel is mounted on a horizontal
axis, from which its rotation is transmitted to the millstone
spindle by a pair of cogwheels (fig. 443B). The vertical mill
is typologically the more primitive form, and therefore
considered by some to be the earlier one.[475]
The "horizontal"
water mill was probably a Roman invention, and
judging from Vitruvius' description (23-25 B.C.), it was
still a relatively recent phenomenon at the time of his
writing. The earliest water mills of the city of Rome
apparently were installed in the Tiber "a little before
Augustus,"[476]
but for the first three centuries of the Empire
man-powered or animal-driven mills remained in the
majority.[477]
It was only from the beginning of the fourth
century onward that the water mill began to supersede the
earlier forms. The earliest pictorial representation of the
Vitruvian water mill is to be found on a fifth-century
439.A GERHARD MEMLING. SEATED MADONNA
FLORENCE, UFFIZI GALLERY. DETAIL
[Courtesy of the Gabinetto della Soprintendenza alle Gallerie]
The painting shows in the background a Northern waterwheel in a form that the
artist perceived it; the work, probably about mid-15th century, cannot be dated
with precision.
mill dating from the time of Leo I (457-474) has recently
been excavated in the Agora of Athens.[479] As early as A.D.
370 water-driven corn mills and saws for cutting marble
were seen by Ausonius on the Ruwer, one of the tributaries
of the Moselle River.[480] An intensely industrial application
of water power for the grinding of grain was a
Roman flour factory with sixteen wheels, erected 308-316
on a mountain slope at Barbegal near Arles (fig. 444). It
worked with two sets of eight overshot wheels, fed by two
channels of water from the aqueduct of Les Beaux, and
could produce in a ten-hour day, with all wheels in operation,
a total of twenty-eight tons of flour, sufficient to feed
a population of 80,000—which fact suggests that it supplied
the entire army of the province of Narbonne (besides
meeting the local demands of Arles, which had a population
of 30,000). There is archaeological evidence for the
existence of a similar flour mill at Prety (Pistriacum), near
Tournus, Burgundy, which ground the grain of the Saone
439.B GERHARD MEMLING. MADONNA AND CHILD
LONDON, NATIONAL GALLERY. DETAIL
[Courtesy of the National Gallery, London. Photo no. 61275]
The waterwheel in the London version of the painting is substantially of the
the same design, and shows with greater detail some of its construction. This
painting dates to about 1468.
supply for the army of northern Gaul.[481] These two facilities
were unusual and owed their existence, unquestionably, to
pressing military demands, but their existence nevertheless
denotes a general trend.
The historical motivations for this mounting interest of
the fourth-century Romans in water as a source of power
for grinding grain are still somewhat mysterious. One cause
was, without doubt, the increasing shortage of slave labor
in the later days of the Roman empire; another one, the
new attitude toward labor associated with the Christian
concept of caritas, resulting in the view that the forces of
nature should be captured and trained to ease the life of
man; still another cause, perhaps, was the fact that the
center of cultural gravitation had shifted from the Mediterranean
basin, where most rivers carry widely varying
quantities of water in different seasons, to a northern area
that abounded with mountain streams fed by a constant
flow of water. Finally, but not least to be contended with:
440.A, B, C, D HAND OPERATED ROMAN MILLS
Stationary or portable mechanisms like these shown above were used in every
Greek and Roman household and were diffused throughout Europe by Greek and
Roman armies. In Roman military camps, where soldiers ground their own corn,
such handmills were a common sight. One mill was provided for every ten men;
each soldier was prepared to carry his own thirty-day flour supply (Forbes, 1956,
109; Moritz, 1958, 116; Horn, 1975, 223, and 231, fig. 7).
The upper stone, in examples A, B, C, D,
weigh, respectively, about 130, 55, 30 and
45 pounds. Quern A, with two handles, could
be operated by two persons. Quern D, a great
advance in the art of milling, provided for
adjustment of the upper stone by an under-table
device that controlled clearance between
stones at their outer rims, thereby regulating
the fineness of the milled particles. Advances
in the arts of military machines were paralleled
by invention in the agrarian arts.
were not slow in putting into the service of their growing
manorial economy technological devices that offered new
prospects of exploitation to the landlords who had the
right and means of building and of operating these mills.[482]
ROMAN MILL IN POMPEII
441.A
441.B
[After Mau, 1908, 408, fig. 237]
The mill of Pompeii operates on the same principle as the table pepper mill. Its
lower fixed stone (meta) is raised on a plinth that also forms a basin to catch freshly
ground flour. The mill is charged with grain at the top; kernels fall into the space
between the two stones (which can be enlarged or decreased by adjusting the spindle
of the moving stone, the catillus, on its overarm) and are ground at the lower edge of
the catillus flange where it touches the meta.
441.C ROMAN DONKEY MILLS
POMPEII. REMAINS OF A ROMAN BAKERY WITH
FOUR DONKEY MILLS AND A BAKING OVEN
[after Forbes, 1956, 110, fig. 77]
Donkey mills are known to have been used in Greece from about 300 B.C. They
could be set up anywhere on land, and for that reason became the favorite Roman
flour mill. The turning circles the animals were forced to follow in this and other
mills of the type were brutally narrow.
442. ROME, MUSEO CHIARAMONTI. FRAGMENT OF A SARCOPHAGUS (2nd cent. B.C.)
HORSE HARNESSED TO A DONKEY MILL
[By courtesy of the Archivio Fotografico delle Gallerie dei Musei Vaticani]
The relief shows the hourglass shaped mill being worked by a horse harnessed to a trace that fits into the rotating upper stone of the mill (cf.
fig. 441. A). The question of the relative distribution of water- and animal-powered mills in medieval Europe, and their differing functions,
requires a new systematic study. In an inquiry into conditions prevalent in certain Carolingian territories west of the Rhine, Weber reaches the
same conclusions that Bennett and Elton came to more generally:
"Wenn man die urkundlich nachweisbaren Standorte berücksichtigt, weiss man auch, dass es sich bei unseren Beispielen nur um Wassermühlen
gehandelt haben kann. Die von Tieren getriebene Mühle bleibt fortab die Ausnahme. Sie wird meist nur für Notfälle eingerichtet, z.B. auf
Burgen und ummauerten Städten für die Zeiten langdauernder Belagerungen." (F. W. Weber, "Die ersten urkundlich nachweisbaren
Wassermühlen westlich des Rheins," Pfälzer Heimat, vol. 3/4, Dec. 1972, 101-103. The journal is not easily available outside Germany.)
ROMAN WATER MILLS
443.A Horizontal water wheel at the end
of a vertical shaft fixed to the
upper millstone.
443.B Vertical waterwheel, with power
transmitted to the upper millstone
by means of gears.
[redrawn by C. B. Lund, after Forbes 1956, 595, fig. 540]
The earliest water mill of which we have any record is one to which the Greek
historian Strabo refers as having been built by the Pontic king, Mithradates VI
Eupator, in his palace at Cabeira (some distance inland from the southern shore
of the Black Sea), which was completed in 63 B.C. (For sources and a
suggestion that this may indicate an Asiatic origin, as in the case of the water-powered
triphammer, see Horn, 1975, pp. 226-27 and below, pp. 245f.)
The origins and the early history of the water mill have been dealt
with in a comprehensive work by Bennet and Elton, 1898-1904, competently
reviewed and amended in a recent article by Curwen, 1944, and
brilliantly rediscussed in a masterful book by L.A. Moritz, 1958. There
is also a basic study by Bloch, 1935, and an historical review by Forbes,
1957. Also see Horn, Journal of Medieval History, I, 1975 219-57.
Others question this view of Moritz, 1958, 131ff. With the exception
of a narrow stretch of land in southwestern France, this type is not well
attested for medieval Germany, France and England. Cf. Curwen's
distribution map, which is based on its modern survival forms (Curwen,
1944, 145, fig. 6).
To the hand-, donkey-, and water-driven mill, we will have to add
as a fourth category the mola divino numine rotata, if the author of the
Life of St. Winnoc may be trusted in his touching account of an event
that occurred late in the seventh century. In order to demonstrate his
humble spirit, Winnoc, the head of a small monastic cell in Worumholt,
Flanders (today: Wormhoudt, Dept. du Nord, arr. Dunkerque), toward
the close of his life decided "that he wished to rotate the mill with his
own sacred hands [molam suis sacris rotare manibus], and thus in grinding
grain into flour, served in daily labor the brothers who lived in this
place as well as Christ's paupers whom he often received there with
great benevolence." The brothers failed to understand how the feeble
and aged Abbot could produce the amount of flour that left his mill
daily, and spying upon him, discovered that the mill "was operated by
the will of God" [divino numine rotatum] rather than by the Abbot's
own hands. The latter simply stood to the side of the stones, his arms
raised in the gesture of prayer (Vita Andomari, Bertini, Winnoci, chap.
25, in Mon. Germ. Hist., V, 1910. 771-72).
Parsons, 1936. The Athenian mill was an overshot; the Vitruvian mill
and the mill on the mosaic of the Palace at Constantinople were undershot.
"As he the river Ruwer turns his millstones in furious revolutions,
and drives the shrieking saws through smooth blocks of marble,"
Ausonius, Mosella, lines 359-64. See Ausonius, ed. Evelyn-White, 1919,
253. But take note that Lynn White, 1962, 82ff, expresses some doubt
concerning the reliability of the manuscript tradition of the Mosella
poem.
For a succinct discussion of the converging historical factors that
might have contributed to the increasing use of water power from the
fourth century onward see Forbes, 1957, 601ff, on whom I am heavily
leaning with this summary. On the new Christian attitude toward labor
see Geoghegan, 1945, 93ff, and Benz, 1964, 241-63.
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