1.3 KiB
One sentence follows another without a paragraph break for the whole of this page, which is the case the sentence splitter exists for. The mill stood at the northern end of the valley, where the fall of the river was steepest and the ice came latest. Its wheel was undershot, which was wasteful, and nobody replaced it for two hundred years because the cost of replacing it fell on one household and the benefit was spread across four hundred. The abbey's mill, two miles downstream, was overshot and newer and better, and the abbey charged more to use it, which the valley resented and paid. When the lord's wheel finally failed, in a winter the chronicle calls hard without saying how hard, the valley ground at the abbey for eleven months and discovered that it preferred the abbey's flour. The lord rebuilt anyway. He had to: the right to compel grinding was worth more than the flour, because it was the visible sign that he could compel anything at all. A right that is never exercised is a right that is being tested, and he knew it, and so did they. The rebuilt mill ran for another century and was still running, badly, when the survey of 1439 recorded it as ruinous and in use. That phrase, ruinous and in use, is as good a description of the whole arrangement as anything a historian has managed since.