History of corn milling .. - Centrostudirpinia.it

126 HISTORY OF CORN MILLING: vol. iv.
^j^jr^,lX\rT r a wcfc uoablc to Fcsist popular encroachment. Little
KING'S MILLS. . ^/
LIVERPOOL, by little it was thus frittered away, chiefly by the
1. Eastham ^id of the corporation ; till
finally, greatly to the
Watermills,
T257-1423.
loss of the owners, whose rights
overridden, it was destroyed.
were not bought but
Nothing is known of Liverpool mills, and very
little of the town itself, before the year 1257, ^he
starting-point of local milling history.
In many places
throughout the kingdom we may point with certainty
to mills being owned and worked, at the earliest
period of our national industrial history, by Saxon
thanes and freemen ; but no such retrospection may
be made at Liverpool. It is, however, impossible to
avoid the conjecture that the town—a chartered port,
and seat of a royal castle, in i 206— possessed some kind
of corn mill other than querns earlier than 1257 5 ^^^
that at that date the avocation of the dusty miller
was already established as one of the first manufacturing
industries of the place. A horse-mill would
doubtless have been set up in the castle ; probably
at the same "bakehouse," which subsequently was
included in the Extent of Liverpool in 1347, was
repaired in 1476,^ and kept in use till about
1670. One or more watermills also would, no
doubt, have begun to cope with the necessities of
the increasing population. One point, however, is
certain ; the charter by King John (Earl of Morton)
in 1206 had made no allusion to milling soke, and
Text, II. 207. therefore, as lord of the manor, he had tacitly
reserved it.f
Duchy Orders,
Edw. IV. 100.
Arch, Journal,
1898, 359.
" The walles of ye Bakehous
*
1476. Writ for repair of Liverpool Castle :
within the Castell to bee taken down for reparacon of ye sd tower."
t John's charter to Liverpool is of the same type as the one granted to the
town of Bristol. That neither of these allowed exemption from milling soke is
not alone evident from subsequent events, but may be directly proved by reference
to another charter of the same Bristol type, in which exemption from soke is
distinctly granted by a special clause; viz. the charter to Lancaster in 1193,
which stipulates, " Furthermore, I have declared the said burgesses freed from suit
to my mill."