‘Our time be a-most gone by,’ said the miller looking up from his work and laying aside the millpeck for a moment as he rubbed his eyes with his white and greasy sleeve.  From a window of the old mill by Okebourne I was gazing over the plain green with rising wheat, where the titlarks were singing joyously in the sunshine.  A millstone had been ‘thrown off’ on some full sacks — like cushions — and Tibbald, the miller, was dexterously pecking the grooves afresh.

The millpeck is a little tool like a double adze, or perhaps rather like two chisels set in the head of a mallet.  Though age was stealing upon him, Tibbald’s eye and hand were still true, and his rude sculpture was executed with curious precision.  The grooves, which are the teeth of the millstone, radiate from the centre, but do not proceed direct to the edge:  they slant slightly.

‘There bean’t many as can do this job,’ he said, ’I can put in sixteen or twenty to the inch.  These old French burrs be the best stone; they be hard, but they be mild and takes the peck well.’  Ponderous as the millstones appear, they are capable of being set so that their surfaces shall grind with extreme accuracy.  The nether, called the ‘bed stone,’ is stationary; the upper millstone, or ‘runner,’ revolves, and the grain crushed between the two works out along the furrows to the edge.

Now and then the miller feels the grain as it emerges with his pudgy thumb and finger, and knows by touch how the stones are grinding.  It is perceptibly warm at the moment it issues forth, from the friction:  yet the stones must not grind too close, or they ‘kill’ the wheat, which should be only just cracked, so as to skin well.  To attain this end, first, the surfaces of the stones must be level, and the grooves must be exactly right; and, secondly, the upper stone must be hung at the exact distance above the other to the smallest fraction of an inch.  The upper millstone is now sometimes balanced with lead, which Tibbald said was not the case of old.

‘We used to have a good trade at this mill,’ he continued, as he resumed his pecking; ’but our time be a-most gone by.  We be too fur away up in these here Downs.  There!  Listen to he!’ A faint hollow whistle came up over the plain, and I saw a long white cloud of steam miles away, swiftly gliding above the trees beneath which in the cutting the train was running.

‘That be th’ express.  It be that there steam as have done for us.  Everything got to go according to that there whistle:  they sets the church clock by he.  The big London mills as be driven by steam does the most of the work; and this here foreign wheat, as comes over in the steamers, puts the market down, so as we yent got a chance to buy up a lot and keep it till the price gets better.  I seed in the paper as the rate is gone down a penny:  the steamers be going to ship the American wheat a penny a bushel cheaper.  So it bean’t much good for Hilary to talk about his wheat.  I thenks that’ll about do.’

He laid down the millpeck, and took his millstaff to prove the work he had done.  This was made of well-seasoned oak, two pieces put together so that they should not warp.  He rubbed the edge with ruddle, and, placing the millstaff on the stone, turned it about on its shorter axis:  where the ruddle left its red mark more pecking would be required.  There was but one small spot, and this he quickly put right.  Even the seasoned oak, however, is not always true, and to be certain on the point Tibbald had a millstaff prover.  This is of rigid steel, and the staff is put on it; if any daylight is visible between the two the staff is not accurate — so delicately must these great stones be adjusted for successful grinding.

The largest of them are four feet two inches diameter; and dangerous things they are to move, for if the men do not all heave or ‘give’ at the same moment the stone may slip, and the edge will take off a row of fingers as clean as the guillotine.  Tibbald, of course, had his joke about that part of the machinery which is called the ‘damsel.’  He was a righteous man enough as millers go, but your miller was always a bit of a knave; nor could he forbear from boasting to me how he had been half an hour too soon for Hilary last Overboro’ market.

He said the vast water-wheel was of elm, but it would not last so long up so near the springs.  Upon a river or brook the wheel might endure for thirty years, and grind corn for a generation.  His millpond was close to the spring-head, and the spring-water ate into the wood and caused it to decay much quicker.  The spokes used to be mortised in, now they used flanges, ironwork having almost destroyed the business of the ancient millwright.  Of all manual workers, probably the old style of millwright employed the greatest variety of tools, and was the cleverest in handling them.  There seemed no end to the number of his chisels and augers; some of the augers of immense size.  In winter time the millwright made the millstones, for the best stones are not in one piece but composed of forty or fifty.  The French burrs which Tibbald preferred come over in fragments, and these are carefully fitted together and stuck with plaster of Paris.  Such work required great nicety:  the old millwright was, in fact, a kind of artist in his handicraft.

I could not help regretting, as Tibbald dilated on these things, that the village millwright no longer existed; the care, the skill, the forethought, the sense of just proportion he exhibited quite took him out of the ranks of the mere workman.  He was a master of his craft, and the mind he put into it made him an artist.  Tibbald went on that he did not care for the Derby or Welsh millstones.  These were in one piece, but they were too hard for the delicate grinding necessary to make the fine flour needed for good bread.  They answered best for barley meal.  Now, the French burr was not only hard but mild, and seemed to feel the corn as it crushed it.  A sack of wheat lost 4 lb. in grinding.  I asked about the toll:  he showed me the old measure, reckoned at the tenth of a sack; it was a square box.  When the lord’s tenants in the olden times were forced to have their corn ground at the lord’s mill, the toll was liable to be abused in a cruel manner; hence the universal opinion that a miller must be a knave.  Even in much more recent times, when the labourers took part of their wages in flour, there is said to have been a great deal of sleight-of-hand in using the toll-box, and the miller’s thumb grew fat by continually dipping into other folk’s sacks.

But Tibbald had an argument even here, for he said that men nowadays never grew so strong as they used to do when they brought their own wheat to be ground at the mill, and when they made their bread and baked it at home.  His own father once carried the fattest man in the parish on his back half a mile; I forget how much he weighed exactly, but it was something enormous, and the fat man, moreover, held a 56 lb. weight in each hand.  He himself remembered when Hilary used to be the strongest man in the place; when the young men met together they contended who should lift the heaviest weight, and he had seen Hilary raise 5 cwt., fair lifting, with the hands only, and without any mechanical appliance.  Hilary, too, used to write his name with a carpenter’s flat cedar pencil on the whitewashed ceiling of the brewhouse, holding the while a 1/2 cwt. of iron hung on his little finger.  The difficulty was to get the weight up, lifting it fairly from the ground; you could lift it very well half-way, but it was just when the arm was bent that the tug came to get it past the hip, after which it would go up comparatively easily.

Now this great strength was not the result of long and special training, or, indeed, of any training at all; it came naturally from outdoor life, outdoor work, plain living (chiefly bacon), and good bread baked at home.  At the present time men ate the finest and whitest of bread, but there was no good in it.  Folk grew tall and big — taller than they used to be, he thought — and they could run quick, and so forth; but there was no stamina, no power of endurance, of withstanding exposure like there was formerly.  The mere measure of a man, he was certain, had nothing to do with his strength; and he could never understand how it was that the army folk would have men precisely so high and so many inches round.  Just then he was called away to a carter who had brought up his team and waggon at the door, and as he was gone some time I went up under the roof, whence there was a beautiful view down over the plain.

The swifts, which had but just arrived, were rushing through the sky in their headlong way; they would build presently in the roof.  The mill was built at the mouth of a coombe on the verge of the Downs; the coombe was narrow and steep, as if nature had begun a cutting with the view of tunnelling through the mass of the hills.  At the upper end of the coombe the spring issued, and at the lower was the millpond.  There is something peculiarly human in a mill — something that carries the mind backwards into the past, the days of crossbow and lance and armour.  Possibly there was truth in Tibbald’s idea that men grow larger in the present time without corresponding strength, for is it not on record that some at least of the armour preserved in collections will not fit those who have tried it on in recent times?  Yet the knight for whom it was originally made, though less in stature and size, may have had much more vigour and power of endurance.

The ceaseless rains last year sent the farmers in some places to the local millers once more somewhat in the old style.  Part of their wheat proved so poor that they could not sell it at market; and, rather than waste it, they had it ground at the village mills with the idea of consuming as much of the flour as possible at home.  But the flour was so bad as to be uneatable.  As I parted with Tibbald that morning he whispered to me, as he leaned over the hatch, to say a good word for him with Hilary about the throw of oak that was going on in one part of the Chace.  ’If you was to speak to he, he could speak to the steward, and may be I could get a stick or two at a bargain’ — with a wink.  Tibbald did a little in buying and selling timber, and, indeed, in many other things.  Pleased as he was to show me the mill, and to talk about it by the hour together, the shrewd old fellow still had an eye to business.

After a while, in walking along the footpaths of the meadows and by the woods, a feeling grew upon me that it would be pleasant to know something of their history.  It was through inquiring about the age of the rookery that this thought took shape.  No one could tell me how long the rooks had built there, nor were there any passing allusions in old papers to fix the date.  There was no tradition of it among the oldest people; all they knew was that the rooks had always been there, and they seemed to indicate a belief that there the rooks would always remain.  It seemed to me, however, that the site of their city was slowly travelling, and in a few generations might be found on the other side of the Chace.  Some of the trees where the nests were most numerous were decaying, and several were already deserted.  As the trees died, the rooks moved to the next clump, and thus gradually shifted their city.

This inquiry led to further reflections about the past of the woods and meadows.  Besides the birds, the flowers, and animals that had been there for so many, many centuries, there were the folk in the scattered homesteads, whose ancestors might have left some record.  In these times history is concerned only with great cities or strategical positions of world-wide renown; interest is concentrated on a siege of Paris or a march towards Constantinople.  In days of yore battles were often fought in or near what seem to us mere villages; little places whose very names are uncertain and exact site unascertainable were the centres of strife.  Some of these places are buried under the sward as completely as Herculaneum under the lava.  The green turf covers them, the mower passes over with his scythe and knows not of them.

Hilary had observed in one of his meadows that the turf turned brown or burnt up in squares during hot summer weather.  This he conjectured to be caused by the shallowness of the soil over some ancient foundations; and some years before he had had the curiosity to open a hole, and soon came upon a hidden wall.  He did not excavate farther, but the old folk, when they heard of it, remembered a tradition of a village having once existed there.  At present there were no houses near; the place, whatever it was, had disappeared.  The mention of this meadow led to some conversation about the names of the fields, which are often very curious.

Such names as Lea, Leaze, Croft, and so on, are readily explained; but what was the original meaning of The Cossicles?  Then there were Zacker’s Hook, the Conigers, Cheesecake, Hawkes, Rials, Purley, Strongbowls, Thrupp, Laines, Sannetts, Gaston, Wexils, Wernils, Glacemere, several Hams, Haddons, and Weddingtons, Slades, and so on, and a Truelocks.  These were quickly put down; scores of still more singular names might be collected in every parish.  It is the meadows and pastures which usually bear these designations; the ploughed fields are often only known by their acreage, as the Ten Acre Piece, or the Twelve Acres.  Some of them are undoubtedly the personal names of former owners.  But in others ancient customs, allusions to traditions, fragments of history, or of languages now extinct, may survive.

There was a meadow where deep trenches could be traced, green now, but clearly once a moat, but there was not even a tradition about it.  On the Downs overlooking the Idovers was an earthwork or entrenchment, of which no one knew anything.  Hilary believed there was an old book — a history of Overboro’ town — which might perhaps contain some information, but where it could be found he did not know.  After some consideration, however, he thought there might be a copy at the Crown, once an old posting-inn, at Overboro’:  that was about the only place where I should be likely to find it.  So one warm summer day I walked into Overboro’, following a path over the Downs, whose short sward affords the best walking in the world.

At the Crown, now no more an inn but an hotel, the archway was blocked up with two hand-trucks piled with trunks and portmanteaus, the property of commercial gentlemen and just about to be conveyed to the station.  What with the ostler and the ‘boots’ and the errand-boys, all hanging about for their fees, it was a push to enter; and the waiters within seemed to equally occupy the passage, fetching the dust-coats and walking-sticks and flourishing coat-brushes.  Seeing a door marked ‘Coffee-room,’ I took refuge, and having ordered luncheon began to consider how I should open my subject with the landlord, who was clearly as much up to the requirements of modern life as if his house had been by a London terminus.  Time-tables in gilt-stamped covers strewed the tables; wine lists stood on edge; a card of the local omnibus to the station was stuck up where all could see it; the daily papers hung over the arm of a cosy chair; the furniture was new; the whole place, it must be owned, extremely comfortable and the service good.

But it was town and not country — to-day and not the olden time; and I did not feel courage enough to ask for the book.  I believe I should have left the place without mentioning it, but, fortunately looking round the room while the lunch was prepared, I found it in the bookcase, where there was a strange mixture of the modern and antique.  I took down the history from between Rich’s thin grey ’Ruins of Babylon’ and a yellow-bound railway novel.

Towards the close of the eighteenth century a learned gentleman had taken much pains to gather together this account of the town.  He began with the story of Brutus, and showed that one of the monarchs descended from the illustrious Trojan founded a city here.  Some fossil shells, indeed, that had been dug up furnished him with conclusive proof that the Deluge had not left the site uncovered, since no how else could they have got there:  an argument commonly accepted in his day.  Thus he commenced, like the monks themselves, with the beginning of the world; but then came a wide gap down to Domesday Book.  The hides and yardlands held by the conquerors — how much was in demesne, how many acres were wood and how many meadow — the number of servi, and what the mill paid were duly translated and recorded.

The descent of the manors through the monasteries and the persons who purchased them at the Dissolution filled several pages, and was supplemented with a charter recognising rights of infang and outfang, assize of bread and ale, and so forth.  Finally, there was a list of the mayors, which some one had carried on in manuscript on a fly-leaf to within ten years of date.  There was an air of precision in the exact sentences, and the writer garnished his tale with frequent quotations from Latin writers.  In the midst was a wood-cut of a plant having no sort of relevancy to the subject-matter, but for which he returned thanks for the loan of the block.

But he had totally omitted his own times.  These quotations, these lists and charters, the extracts from Domesday, read dry and formal — curious, and yet not interesting.  Had he described the squires and yeomen, the townspeople of his own day, their lives and manner of thinking, how invaluable and pleasing his work would have been!

Hilary said that in these little country towns years ago people had to be very careful how they acted, lest they should offend some local magnate.  He remembered a tradesman telling him how once he had got into great disgrace for putting a new knocker on his private side door, without first asking permission and sending round to obtain the opinion of an old gentleman.  This person had nothing whatever to do with the property, but lived retired and ruled his neighbours with a rod of iron.  The old knocker was quite worn out, but the new one had scarcely been fastened on when the unfortunate owner was summoned to the presence of the irate old gentleman, who demanded with great wrath what on earth he meant by setting himself up above his station in this way.  It was only by a humble answer, and by begging the old gentleman to walk down and look at the discarded knocker, promising that it should be replaced if he thought proper, that he could be appeased.  A man then hardly dared appear in a new hat without first suggesting the idea to his social superior.