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The Miller's Rights

The family at the center of the Wesemann Family section held mills for at least eighty years. Milling then was not a job in the modern sense. It was a granted position, with assigned customers, a legal tenure, a costly water works, and a place in the village that was both prosperous and a little suspect.

A Right Before a Business

The right to build and run a mill belonged to the ruler, and a miller needed the ruler’s consent to work. So every mill had a grantor, a rent, a district and a file. Water mills were the main rural industry of this district. Around 1700 more than a hundred are thought to have worked in what is now the district of Holzminden, fed by the streams of the Solling hills. Besides grain mills there were oil, grinding, saw and paper mills, and a grain mill was often run together with an oil mill.

Hereditary Rent and Lease

Two kinds of tenure run through the Wesemann Family and The German Mills sections. Under hereditary rent (Erbenzins) ownership was divided. The lord kept the superior title (Obereigentum), and the holder had the working title (nutzbares Eigentum), which he could pass to his heirs or sell. Prussia’s law code of 1794 sets out the arrangement in these words, and the same language was used across the German states. The holder owed a yearly rent in money or grain and a fee each time the holding changed hands (Laudemium). He needed the lord’s consent to mortgage or divide it, and the lord could take it back for long arrears or neglect. Each of these steps made paperwork, kept by the grantor rather than the parish.

A lease (Pacht) was weaker. A leaseholder (Pächter) held for a set term, at the owner’s pleasure, with nothing to sell or pass on. A family holding one mill on hereditary rent and leasing a second held two very different things; the second could simply end.

Customers by Law

Under compulsory milling (Mühlenzwang), the people of a set district had to have their grain ground at one named mill. The miller did not compete for customers and could not gain more. His income depended on how much grain his villages grew and on a rate fixed by custom. That made millers rivals by design. In the mid-1700s the miller at Merxhausen, about twenty kilometers from Linse, opposed a new mill at Hellental, pointing to his assigned district and to the plain fact that two mills close together could not both live. The license was granted anyway. What matters is that a miller expected to quarrel with the next wheel, and the state expected it too. The rule was not the same everywhere, though. It was a patchwork of local arrangements of different age and strength, often written down late and full of exceptions.

The miller was paid in kind, with a fixed share of the grain brought to him (Mahlmetze or Molter). Ordinances of the 1700s give rates from a tenth to a twentieth part, set by local custom, with penalties for cheating on either side. Some mills posted the rate on a board. Payment in grain meant a miller held the one thing that counted in a bad year and often lent to his neighbors. His leftover bran fed pigs, which is why mills kept them. And because his share came out of a sack the customer could not check, the arrangement invited the charge of theft; the old figure of the thieving miller grew out of how millers were paid. Grain prices swung hard. The harvests of 1816 and 1817 failed and prices ran high. By the early 1820s good harvests had driven them down so far that farms selling much of their grain fell into trouble, and the Duchy set up a state credit bank to carry them. A miller paid in grain was protected from falling prices only as far as he ate his share instead of selling it.

Water

A water mill runs on the height of its water, not on the water alone. The miller dams the stream to raise the level at his wheel. Too low a dam costs him power. Too high a dam floods the meadows above and backs water into the outflow of the mill upstream, stealing that miller’s power. The lawful height was marked by a post set in the stream bed, called an Eichpfahl and by other names in other regions. Milling ordinances said how it was to be made, set and protected, forbade a miller to move it or rebuild his weir unless the sworn millers and the neighbors above and below were present, and set penalties for going over the mark. Where several mills shared a stretch of river, their places gave them their names: upper mill, middle mill and lower mill (Obermühle, Mittelmühle, Untermühle), with the millers named to match. A name like that describes a mill’s place on the water, and its place on the water was what the lawsuits were about. Lawsuits over dam heights were the normal life of a mill on a small river, not the mark of a quarrelsome family.

A country mill seldom did only one job. The same wheel was geared to whatever the district produced: grain, oil pressed from flax and rapeseed, sawn timber, ground sandstone, paper, or tree bark for the tanners. Several trades protected a miller against the water itself, since low water in summer and ice in winter both stopped the wheel, and floods were a constant risk.