University of Virginia Library

EUROPEAN SOURCES BEFORE MARCO POLO

A literary account of poetic beauty of water-driven
trip-hammers, written decades before Marco Polo's visit
to China (A.D. 1280), is to be found in a remarkable thirteenth-century
description of the waterworks of the monastery
of Clairvaux. There, after telling how the river Aube
had been deflected from its natural course, the writer
traces the water's path as it travels from workshop to
workshop, "launching itself at once upon the wheels of the
mill, and lashed into foam by their motion, it grinds the
meal under the weight of the millstones, and separates the
fine from the coarse by a sieve of fine tissue." Then, after
a brief excursion into the brewery, "where it fills the
boiler and is heated for brewing. . . not hesitating nor
refusing any who requires its aid," it follows the call of the
fullers, at whose workshop, close by the mill, "you may
see it causing to rise and fall alternately the heavy pestles,
that is to say, hammers or wooden foot-shaped blocks—for
that name seems to agree better with the treading-work, as
it were of the fullers—and so relieves them of the heaviest
part of their labor" (sed graves illos, sive pistillos, sive malleos
dicere mavis, vel certe pedes ligneos—nam hoc nomen saltuoso
fullonum negotio magis videtur congruere—alternatim elevans
atque deponens, gravi labore fullones absolvit. . .)[534]