Landlords repeatedly smashed peasant handmills and crushed mill-right protests for centuries.

Evidence

Evidence of centuries of attempts by landlords to obliterate peasant handmills has been found in scattered documents. In twelfth-century England, for example, officials of the manor charged with executing the lord’s right to enforce justice entered cottages and, buttressed by decrees dictating that “the men shall not be allowed to possess any handmills,” smashed illegal mills. In Hertfordshire in 1274, artisans had refused to use not only the official watermill for grain grinding but also the lord’s fulling mill for the beating of cloth. Mills and materials were seized and destroyed and court proceedings instituted. A second uprising by peasants in 1326 demanded cottage milling rights; eighty mills began operating in the homes of peasants and artisans, only to be confiscated five years later. Then in 1381 an open insurrection demanded a local charter allowing the use of handmills, only to be defeated this time by a royal statute denying domestic milling privileges. The issue resurfaced in 1547 when grinding rights were granted to the cottagers of Kingsthorpe manor. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 263

Categorization

• XREF: Legal suppression of commoners’ productive technology connects to the law/institutions thread shared across the polyad courses. — connects to: Machine-breaking revolts spanned a century and a half of English labor history — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 232
• CANDY: Repeated mill-smashing and confiscation uprisings from 1274 to 1547 is a vivid, concrete slice of preindustrial class conflict over technology.

Broader Connections

• Machine-breaking revolts spanned a century and a half of English labor history #expands (0.72) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 232