Corn Mills in Ancient Times. Till about fifty years before the commencement of the Christian era, the ancients had no large mills forced round by water, but ground their corn in small mills of one stone rolling rapidly round upon another, and impelled by the hands of women-servants or slaves. The stones used for that purpose were circular, portable, nicely wrought, and adapted for turning; the upper one being the smaller of the two, with an iron or wooden handle fixed into its edge; the lower being larger, and probably harder—at least if we may infer from an expression in the book of Job, "hard as a piece of the nether millstone." An excellent quarry in the neighborhood of Babylon (we are informed by Xenophon) supplied all the countries of the East with such millstones. That women, or maid-servants, generally performed this piece of domestic labor, we are assured by the very first mention made of grinding with mills, that in Exodus, (xi. 5,) "All the first-born in the land of Egypt shall die, from the first-born of Pharaoh that sitteth upon the throne, even unto the first-born of the maid-servant that is behind the mill;" in which passage, from the contrasted states of dignity and meanness, it is plain, that, in Egypt at least, the drudgery of grinding was deemed the lowest possible. Two women were generally employed; they sat fronting each other, with the millstone between them, which was kept whirling by alternate impulsions of the hand. Slaves taken in war were frequently doomed to undergo this tedious penance; Samson "did grind in the prison-house of the Philistines;" the Hebrews, in their Babylonish captivity, were subjected to its degradation; "they took our young men to grind," says Jeremiah in his Lamentations; and Isaiah, in his prophetic declaration to Babylon of her impend. ing state of captivity, bids her, as a proper badge of her servile subjection, "take millstones and grind meal." The piece of a millstone whereby Abimelech was slain, when he was attacking the tower of Thebez, was cast upon his head by a "certain woman," whom it befitted to wield as a weapon, the humble utensil of her daily occupation. Portable millstones of this description must have been brought by the children of Israel from Egypt, and carried with them all the way through the wilderness, as we read in Numbers, (xi. 8,) that "the people ground the manna in mills." As by the laws of Athens no creditor was allowed to distrain the plough and other simple and necessary utensils of rustic labor, so by the laws of Moses, (Deut. xxiv. 6,) it was permitted to no man " to take the nether or the upper millstone to pledge"-in other words, to take them by distraint in lieu of any debt. The morning, before or at sunrise, was the time allotted in the domestic arrangement for grinding for the family as much flour as was needful for the consumption of the day. An interesting particular connected with the practice of nocturnal grinding, may be quoted from the military history of Julian. His forces, when besieging some strong place on the Tigris, had wrought a deep mine under the walls and buildings to the very centre of the city, when his soldiers, on digging the earth upwards to the surface, found themselves after midnight in the middle of the house of a poor woman, who was busily employed in grinding corn for flour-bread, and who, doubtless, was not a little astonished at the emersion into her solitary chamber of such extraordinary visitants. The operation of grinding by the females was always accompanied, as it still is in the East, with melodious and shrill-trilled ditties, sung in chorus, which sounded strong enough to be heard out of doors throughout all the lanes and streets; the pleasant jolity of which, associated as it was with the just apparent brightness of dawn, and announcing the approaching activity of village or city population just awaking to their daily labor, gave to this simple domestic operation a peculiar character of happiness, peaceful industry, and tranquillity. The Hebrew writers, accordingly, always connect the sound of the morning mill with prosperity and repose, coupling it, in its degree of vivacity, with "the voice of harpers and musicians;" its cessation they associate with the presence of melancholy, trouble, and adversity. Thus, when the wise man wishes to describe the dreary melancholy of old age, he expresses it by the "sound of the grinding" being "low." "I will take away the sound of the millstone," says Jeremiah, to express utter desolation. We are informed by travellers that such lively chants are still sung by females in Persia and Africa when engaged in grinding. The heart of Mungo Park, in the Afric desert, was softened and reminded of his home by the chant of the women grinding. The Grecian women, also, had a ditty of this kind, called the Song of the Mill. It began, " Grind, mill, grind; even Pittacus king of Mitylene doth grind. For it seems that Pittacus, king, or tyrant, as he was called, of Mitylene, and reckoned also one of the seven wise men of Greece, had been accustomed, in moments of unoccupied languor, to resort for amusement to the grinding-mill, that being, as he called it, his best gymnasium, or pleasantest exercise in smallest space. As sometimes for health, so sometimes also for obtaining an honest livelihood, was grinding resorted to by persons above the common order. There is a story told of the two philosophers Menedemus and Asclepiades, who, when young men, and students of wisdom under one of the Athenian masters, were enabled to maintain a respectable personal appearance by grinding every night at the mill for two drachmæ, or about 1s. 4d. a night; on hearing which signal proof of industry, the Areopagites, in admiration of their love of wisdom and frugality, presented them with an honorary donation of two hundred drachmæ, to support them during their time of study. The Romans seem to have invented a larger class of mills, driven by mules, asses, or oxen, (called molæ jumentariæ,) and to have introduced them during the course of their conquests in the East. The stones employed in these mills were of a larger size, and much more operose in their revolution, and effective in their labor. Allusion is made to one of these larger millstones in the passage of the Gospel, (Luke xvii. 2,) where it is said, "it were better that a millstone were hanged about his neck," the larger millstone impelled by asses being there understood in the original; it is to be regretted that the emphasis given to the sentiment by the distinctive word implying the larger stone, is lost in our translation. The first corn-mill driven by water was invented and set up by Mithridates, king of Cappadocia, the most talented, studious, and ingenious prince of any age or country. It was set up in the neighborhood of his capital or palace, about seventy years before the commencement of the Christian era. It was probably from this favorable circumstance of the invention of the water-mill, and the facility thereby afforded to the Cappadocian people for making cheap, good, and abundant flour, that the Cappadocian bakers obtained high celebrity, and were much in demand for two or three centuries posterior to the invention of mills, throughout all the Roman world. Coincident with the era of the inventor, as mentioned by Strabo, is the date of the Greek epigram on water-mills by Antipater, a poet of Syria or Asia Minor, who is supposed to have lived sixty or eighty years before Christ. This epigram may be thus translated : Ye maids, who toil'd so faithful at the mill, Now cease from work, and from these toils be still; For what your hands performed so long, so true, And bring the floury heaps luxuriant to the ground, The greater convenience and expedition in working of these water-mills soon made them be spread over the world. In about twenty or thirty years after their invention, one was set up on the Tiber. They must have been not uncommon in Italy in the age of Vitruvius, for he gives a description of them. Yet it is rather surprising that Pliny, whose eye nothing of art or nature escapes, has taken no notice of them. In the age of Theodosius, (about 380 A. D.,) the public corn-mills of the city of Rome seem to have been wrought principally or altogether by slaves. According to an historian, these corn-mills were all placed in the subterranean apartments or cellars of an immense pile of buildings used by the Roman bakers as a public bakehouse. He tells a strange story of this Roman pistrinum. It was built, it seems, on an immense scale, with grinding dungeons below, and shops or taverns along its front and sides, where were sold the loaves, and wherein were at the same time exhibited other tavern temptations to seduce the simple ones and the strangers. Into these trap-taverns people went without suspicion; but no sooner were some of them wheedled in, than, by means of some mechanical pitfalls made in the floor, they were precipitated into the grinding-vault, and found themselves irrecoverably caught and imprisoned. There they were compelled to work as drudges of the mill, their friends all the while believing them dead. At last the insidious bakehouse was exposed and destroyed by a soldier of Theodosius. He, too, was plunged into the subterranean mill-house, but fortunately having his sword at his side, he drew it, and by the terror of his menaces, and his layingsabout, he forced the people to let him go. The insidious workhouse was exposed, and, by the order of the emperor, demolished to its foundations. At a later period, Rome was supplied with meal from mills placed upon boats on the Tiber, the rush of the water driving the wheels. Mills on a large scale have been for ages established in all European and other countries in which the arts have been improved. In some of the remote parts of the British islands, however, the practice of bruising corn in a mortar, or of grinding it in a small hand-mill, is not yet entirely disused. In the Highlands of Scotland, these rudely fashioned hand-mills are called querns; and the primeval practice of singing while working at them is still kept up. Pennant, in his Tour through Scotland in 1769, gives drawings of the Highland querns. Mr. Robert Jamieson, in a work entitled "Popular Ballads and Songs," of which he was editor, relates the following interesting anecdote, illustrative of the condition of life in which the quern is still, or was lately, in use : "On a very hot day in the beginning of autumn, the author, when a stripling, was travelling afoot over the mountains of Lochaber, from Fort Augustus to Inverness; and when he came to the house where he was to have breakfasted, there was no person at home, nor was there any place where refreshment was to be had nearer than Duris, which is eighteen miles from Fort Augustus. With this disagreeable prospect, he proceeded about three miles farther, and turned aside to the first cottage he saw, where he found a hale-looking, lively, tidy, little, middle-aged woman, spinning wool, with a pot on the fire, and some greens ready to be put into it. She understood no English, and his Gaelic was then by no means good, though he spoke it well enough to be intelligible. She informed him that she had nothing in the house that could be eaten, except cheese, a little sour cream, and some whiskey. On being asked, rather sharply, how she could dress the greens without meal, she good-humoredly told him that there was plenty of meal in the croft, pointing to some unreaped barley that stood dead-ripe and dry before the door; and if he could wait half an hour, he should have brose and butter, bread and cheese, bread and milk, or any thing else that he chose. To this he most readily assented, as well on account of the singularity of the proposal, as of the necessity of the time; and the good dame set with all possible expedition about her arduous undertaking. She first of all brought him some cream in a bottle, telling him, 'He that will not work, neither shall he eat;' if he wished for butter, he must shake that bottle with all his might, and sing to it like a mavis all the time; for unless he sang to it, no butter would come. She then went to the croft, cut down some barley, burnt the straw to dry the grain, rubbed the grain between her hands, and threw it up before the wind to separate it from the husks; ground it upon a quern, sifted it, made a bannock of the meal, set it up to bake before the fire; lastly, went to milk her cow, that was reposing during the heat of the day, and eating some outside cabbage leaves 'ayont the hallan.' She sang like a lark the whole time, varying the strain according to the employment to which it was adapted. In the mean while, a hen cackled under the eaves of the cottage; two new-laid eggs were immediately plunged into the boiling pot, and in less than half an hour, the poor, starving, faint, and way-worn minstrel, with wonder and delight sat down to a repast, that, under such circumstances, would have been a feast for a prince." |