This article appeared in the 6th February 2026 Newsletter

PAYING THE MILLER.

The mill was until the 1880s owned by the local Lord of the Manor, which from the early 1600’s was the Howards of Corby Castle. They would lease out the mill to a miller and by that period in time the rent would have been in cash rather than in kind. Being owned by the Lord of the Manor the residents of the manor had to take all their grain to the mill to be ground and they paid a fee, Moulture, which was a proportion of the grain taken to the mill. When the mill was advertised to let in 1804 the Moulture was stated to be 1/16th of the grain milled. By the time of the next advert for the letting of the mill in 1817 the Moulture is not mentioned and it is no longer described as a manorial mill.

This would in the medieval period have been collected by the Miller as he milled the grain. Part would have been kept for his wage and the rest passed to the Lord of the Manor. By the nineteenth century although stipulated as a 1/16th there was probably reasonable chance most transactions were in money rather than grain.

Because each person brought their own grain to the mill for milling and would therefore expect their own grain back. The Miller would therefore have to keep every batch of grain separate and each batch would have to be milled separately.  As I discussed last week, the main grain being milled would have been oats. There are two differences when milling oats compared to other grains. The husk on oats doesn’t come off when they are threshed, so they have to be passed through a set of shelling stones to remove them and then winnowed to remove the husks before they are milled or rolled. The second problem is once oats are milled the oat meal soon starts to go rancid compared to other flours. Therefore people would only have small quantities milled at any one time, enough to last them two to four weeks. So a trip to the mill would have been a regular occurrence.

From the 1820s the running of the mill became more of an independent business, with the Miller doing his own deals etc. A number of later Millers describe themselves as  flour dealers and or grain merchants. The Eckersley Brothers who owned the mill at the turn of the century styled themselves more as grocers. They ran the shop which is now Miller’s Cottage and a second one in Heads Nook.

ECKERSLEY’S  BILL HEAD

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