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The Miller's Life

Craft and Title

Milling was a formal craft, with apprenticeship, years as a journeyman and admission as a master. The titles master miller (Müllermeister, Mühlenmeister) record a qualification and a rank, not just work. A miller’s skills went well beyond grinding, to gearing, dressing millstones, and building weirs and races, which made him more like a millwright than a shopkeeper. From 1864 mill building was taught at the building-trades school in Holzminden, the district town for this family.

The titles say different things. Hereditary-rent miller (Erbenzinsmüller) records tenure; master miller records craft standing; middle miller records place on the stream; leaseholder records a lease. Each time a clerk chose one, he was saying something specific, even if he chose differently the next year. The term “art mill” (Kunstmühle), for a mill at the technical frontier, belongs to the last third of the 1800s, when roller mills replaced millstones and turbines and steam replaced water wheels. A title written in 1832 therefore cannot mean the operator of a roller mill. Titles could also be used loosely, without any change in a man’s position, so a change of title between two entries does not by itself mean his life had changed. The Kirchbrak baptisms of 1840 and March 1842 both call the same man the lessee of the mill (Mühlenpächter), at the same mill.

Dust

Milling is a dusty trade, and its dangers were described while this family worked at it. Bernardino Ramazzini’s book on the diseases of workers, published at Padua in 1700 and enlarged in 1713, founded the study of work-related illness. Two of its chapters concern mills, one on bakers and millers and one on the sifters and measurers of grain. In the second, Ramazzini described a very fine dust given off by stored grain, and in the men who worked in it a dry cough, wasting, asthma and dropsy. This is usually taken as the first medical description of a lung disease caused by work. He blamed “small worms” too tiny to see, mixed with the wheat dust, which is closer to the truth than it sounds, since grain dust carries mites, mold spores and bacteria. His chapter on bakers and millers also notes that grain millers commonly went deaf, and recommends ear plugs.

Modern medicine confirms the danger. Flour and grain dust irritates the lungs and can make workers allergic to it. Its known effects range from hay fever and work-related asthma (flour dust is one of the commonest causes of it in the United Kingdom) through grain fever and chronic bronchitis to inflamed and scarred lungs and lasting loss of breath. Bacterial poisons in the dust are thought to drive much of the airway damage. Smoking is not the explanation: grain workers who had never smoked show far more chronic bronchitis than others and measurably weaker breathing.

For a mill family, the dust was at home as well as at work. A miller did not travel to the dust; he lived in it. The mill house was the family’s home, the grain was stored above and beside the living rooms, and his wife and children were in the building every working day. Bagging the flour, dressing the stones and cleaning the sifting gear were the dustiest jobs in the mill, and the household did them. The dust was worst after the harvest and with grain that had been stored damp or long.

A death from it would reach the register as a chest word. The pastor wrote what the family or a doctor told him, in the words of his time: chest trouble, asthma, wasting, lung disease, dropsy. Ramazzini’s four symptoms match four words a Brunswick clerk had at hand. A miller’s dust disease would be written down in the same words as tuberculosis, heart failure, emphysema or pneumonia, and could not be told apart from them on the page. Tuberculosis alone caused as many as a quarter of all deaths in Europe during parts of the 1700s and 1800s, and in western Europe it peaked in the first half of the 1800s. In a family of that time, several chest deaths are what one would expect. The Wesemann Family section records the chest words in this family’s own burials; whether the mill had any part in them is an open question.

Standing

Millers were well off and a little suspect at the same time. By village standards a miller with a hereditary mill was often among the richer men of the parish, and such mills often stayed in one family for generations. He handled other people’s grain, kept accounts and dealt with the district office. Yet the trade carried a stain. The regional history of this district says flatly that milling counted as dishonorable (unehrlich). Wider scholarship is more careful. Werner Danckert’s classic list of dishonorable trades includes millers, and has been criticized for treating a loose cluster of prejudices as one legal category; Richard van Dülmen and the standard legal-history article treat honor and dishonor as varying by region and changing over time. The proverbs about millers are well recorded; actual legal penalties were another matter, and they were gone by the 1800s. Even the mill’s place set the miller apart. A mill stands on the water, usually outside the village, sometimes with its own name and land, belonging to a parish it does not sit in.

One Heir

In northwest Germany a holding passed whole to one heir, and a mill cannot be divided at all. One son took it; the others took a settlement and left, into another mill by marriage, into a trade, into day labor or overseas. Records shaped by this custom show one son at the mill, unmarried brothers and sisters still in the household in middle age because their share was too small to marry on, and younger sons turning up at other mills. Millers also married millers’ daughters. Their world was the other mills on the same water, not the farms of their own village, so a bride named as a master miller’s daughter from another parish usually points to the next mill and the next register.

The End of the Old Order

Brunswick joined the German customs union in 1841 and passed a farm reform in 1854. In 1864, four years after George emigrated, it brought in freedom of trade (Gewerbefreiheit), which swept away the old limits on who could take up a trade and was followed by a wave of new industry. With freedom of trade the compulsory mill district lost its force: a farmer could take his grain anywhere, and anyone could build a mill. Then the machines moved on. Roller mills, mechanical sifting and steam made large mills cheaper per sack, and railways carried grain and flour to them. By the 1860s a village mill was up against something it could not match. These changes came after the Wesemanns had lost both of their mills, so whatever ended the family’s milling, it was not the end of compulsory milling.