History of corn milling .. - Centrostudirpinia.it

106 HISTORY OF CORN MILLING: vol. iv.
DEE^MiLLS
^^* Edmund GamuU, with much ingenuity and
CHESTER.' harassing toil, had now placed the fortunes of the
23. Francis niills upon an apparently sound footing. Their ancient
Gamull, heir, rights were fully confirmed, the Commissioners of
1616.
Sewers were defeated, the citizens of Chester were
held in friendly alliance, and the income was suffi-
ciently high to yield an assessed rental of ^1000 a year.
Seven years of peaceful prosperity for Gamull ensued,
broken only by the loss of his eldest son, Thomas
Gamull, Recorder of Chester, who died in 1614. In
the church of St. Mary's-on-the-Hill, near the mills, was
erected to his memory ''a fair and beautiful tomb,
very curiously and all of alabaster wrought." Here
two years later the alderman himself was laid ;
leaving as his heir his grandson Francis (son of
Thomas, and represented on the tomb as a child
kneeling at the feet of his parents), subsequently the
last and greatest of the feudal millers of Chester.
Of Edmund Gamull— '' a late alderman, of great
and good account, of this city, ... for whom were
to be wished some monument answerable to his
worth "— there is no monument.* Though the effigy
of Alice Gamull, widow of Thomas, (who
erected the
tomb,) is shown thereon, she survived her husband
some years, and, by a second marriage, introduced
* In the same church, we may not forget, are buried the two Randle Hohnes,
justices of the peace and mayors of Chester ; to whose praiseworthy care in preserving
the scattered milling documents of the Gamulls, now contained in the
Harleian MSS., this sketch of the history of the mills is so greatly indebted.