Domesday records that the village had three mills, a simple enough statement but one which implies a number of other considerations. Although the mills would have been of the basic undershot design, where the wheel is turned by the flow of the water passing below rather than the weight of water dropping on it from above, they were still expensive to build and maintain.

Royal landlords

Almost certainly they would have belonged to the Lord of the Manor which, in the case of Steventon was King Harold before 1066 and King William afterwards. Peasant farmers working the village lands would have been obliged to use the Lord’s mills for their grain, and to pay for the privilege.

A fast flow of water

Three mills implies that the flat clay lands of Steventon were producing plenty of grain, and this also implies that the heavy plough, pulled by a team of up to eight oxen must have been in use well before the Norman conquest.

Mills require a fast water flow to be efficient and this could be achieved by constructing a leat – a straight, graded length of channel, cleared regularly of silt, which allowed the water to move at speed towards the waterwheel. The channel above the fall in Mill Street is an excellent example. If there were three mills, ideally they would be sufficiently spread apart so that the flow of water could gain pace between each one, either naturally or with a leat. The location of the three Steventon mills would most likely have been at Hill Farm, Mill Street and at Sheepwash.

The wool industry

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Steventon and other villages on the Ginge Brook, became the centre of a vibrant and lucrative wool industry. Through a laborious process, coarse wool was converted to lengths of kersey cloth, with the most delicate stage being the ‘fulling’ of the wool.

This comprised pounding the wool with wooden mallets in order to soften and ‘full’ it. In time, this process stopped being a manual operation and became mechanical: grain mills were converted to fulling mills where the power of the water was harnessed to rotate wooden mallets for beating cloth rather than millstones to grind grain.

In 1402, a William Heed and his wife Rose, acquired the land between the Ginge Brook and Manor farm, and around the same time converted the mill to a fulling mill. In other records of the time, William’s surname became Fuller, perhaps a mark of his success