We can trace the presence at one time or another of four corn, or grist, mills in the Parish of Thringstone, one water-mill, that is, and three wind-mills. Of these the water-mill, whose outer shell still remains down in the valley at the north end of the village, undoubtedly takes precedence in the order of age, and importance. This last is owing to the fact that we first hear of it as being the mill of the 'lord' of Thringstone, an ownership which implied that all the inhabitants and tenants of the manor in which it was situated would have to take their corn there to be ground, even the private use of querns or handmills being prohibited; thus constituting a monopoly the medieval miller did not fail to turn to his own advantage.

"Well koude he stelen corn and tollen thrice," as old geoffrey Chaucer said in the fourteenth century, which meant that the miller robbed those who brought their corn to be ground by keeping back threefold his proper due. His proper due, be it said, was usually a twentieth, or twenty-fourth, part of the corn ground, but this was often times exceeded. We hear of an instance at Loughborough about the year 1630, of complaint being made that the Earl of Huntingdon's millers were in the habit of taking five, six, seven or even eleven pounds of corn out of a strike, notwithstanding the protests of the inhabitants of the town, who were compelled to patronise them. The sole right of keeping a dovecote was another of the privileges enjoyed by the lord of a manor in medieval times.

When the Thringstone water-mill was erected is uncertain. The Domesday survey of 1086 does not mention either Thringstone or Swannington, but we cannot assume from this omission that these townships had not then come into existence, since they may have been included in the mother parish of Whitwick, which the enumerators of the survey recorded*. It is evident, however, that there was a water-mill at Thringstone at a very early date. Among the Rawdon-Hastings M.S. is an undated charter of the reign of Henry III (1216-1272), which runs to the effect that Robert of Thringstone granted to his son, William, the Manor of Thringstone and the mill. William retained the manor until the year 1309, when we find him handing it over to a certain Robert Tebbe. That the water-mill passed along with the manor at this time is shown by another Rawdon-Hastings M.S. of the year 1360, which informs us that Adam Tebbe, son of Robert Tebbe, was the owner of the Manor and water-mill of Thringstone. For the next two centuries the history of the manor and mill becomes too obscure and involved for us to deal with here. The difficulty is that there were two manors in the township, one of them owned by the Priory of Grace Dieu, and we have not yet arrived at any satisfactory conclusion in which of these two the water-mill was situated. In the year 1553, the situation clears up a little, for we find a manor in Thringstone passing to the Earl of Huntingdon who, twenty years later, 1573, leased to one Gilbert Vincent, his capital messuage at Thringstone, and 'the water-mill called Thringstone Mill' for 21 years at an annual rent of £5. This is the last we hear of our water-mill. Judging by the terms of the above lease, it had evidently now ceased to be a manor mill with its peculiar rights and privileges, and had become simply a private business concern, remaining in this condition until it was closed down about 40 years ago(c 1890).

* About fifteen years after Mr Butler Johnson had written the above essay, the Derbyshire Domesday village of Trangesbi was identified as the Leicestershire village of Thringstone. ('Early Scandinavian Settlement in Derbyshire', Journ. Derbyshire Archaeological and Nat.Hist.Soc (Derby, 1947), New Series, xx, p. 108).

Some further notes (May 2000)

The water-mill was completely demolished in about 1935. Some very dilapidated ruins still stand close by, though these are the remains of outbuildings that would have stood behind the old millhouse. Sadly, no photographs of the mill are known to exist.

Two little explorers help lend some perspective to the above photograph, which shows part of the now dry cutting which once carried water to the ancient mill. Further uphill in the same field can be found a much deeper cutting which crosses the A512, dug in 1794 to facilitate a horse-drawn tramroad for the ill-fated Charnwood Forest Canal.

(Photo by Steve Badcock, July 2000)

Undoubtedly, the most interesting piece of remaining evidence to be found here is a long cutting which once acted as a sluice. This is banked up and stops abruptly, where a regulated flow of water would have fed an overshot wheel. The cutting is now largely dry though a small quantity of water is still fed into one section where a channel has been cut to allow the trickle of water from a spring. The main supply for the sluice was drawn from the Thringstone Brook, starting in a field behind the present-day Glebe Road and clearly defined on old maps. (It is interesting to note that the historian, Lavengro, mentions that the area behind the Fox Inn once used to be known as, "Blue Mills". This may have had something to do with the fact that this area would have overlooked the course of the sluice and the valley leading down to the water-mill.)

The local historian, George Green (in his notes kept at Loughborough Library) describes a walk that he took to the mill site with Mr E Colledge in June 1956: "He took me down the Main Street which runs at an angle off The Green. Near the end of the street where older houses have stood he showed me on the left-hand side the stone-walled Pinfold, still in a sound condition. By it runs a footpath which in a short distance comes to Thringstone Water Mill. This has not been worked for a good few years. Its old race still carries the water from the brook. It is only a small stream but after a night of rain (the first for six weeks) it had turned into an eight or ten feet deep waterfall giving quite a scenic effect. The path approaches the old house and buildings through a hedged-in passage very overgrown. The actual buildings are very old brickwork with some stone foundations and dressing."

The sluice cutting, which is remarkably well preserved given the length of time that it has been redundant, runs through the same field as a cutting for the horse-drawn tramroad which once enabled coal to be transported to the start of the Charnwood Forest Canal at Thringstone Bridge.

It is sad to think that this field, containing such intriguing vestigial remains from a long-forgotten age, may one day be lost under a housing estate.

Mr. Johnson's article on "Thringstone Mills" continued.

The three wind-mills now come under our consideration. It may surprise some of our readers that a wind-mill formerly stood on the eastern side of, and a short distance away from, the present Stoneycroft farmhouse. A privately-printed memoir, entitled 'The Annals of an Old English Family,' by James Booth Elverston (Bednall Bros., Manchester, 1896), makes mention of this mill. It was, it seems, owned and worked by a member of the old family of Elverston of Thringstone Moor - the name still survives in Elverston's Yard - who lived in a house close by. The date of the erection of this mill, which we take to have been a wooden post-mill, is not given in the memoir, though we are told that it was burnt down about the year 1780, a large amount of corn being destroyed in, what was evidently a furious conflagration. We should be glad of any further information concerning this mill. Its exact site may be known to some of our readers.

Wind-mill number two, a post-mill, stood in the Mill Hill Close opposite the entrance to St. George's Vicarage. We have been given to understand by old residents that it was overturned in a gail in the early part of the 19th century, certainly before 1845, the man in charge being killed. It was then re-erected at St.George's Hill in Swannington parish, and was taken down about the year 1894, soon after death of its last proprietor, Mr Thomas Kerby. Its sites in the Mill Hill Close, and on St George's Hill, can still be traced. We do not assign any great antiquity to this mill, since we are of the opinion that it could not have been erected until after the passing of the Pegg's Green Enclosure Act at the end of the 18th century.

Wind-mill number three in our list, a brick smock-mill, still forms a fine land mark, standing, as it does, just within the Thringstone parish boundary near St George's Hill*. This mill was built about the year 1820 by a Mr.John Griffin to take the place of another, and smaller, smock-mill, which up to that time had stood a hundred yards or so away to the east in the next parish. The mill we see today is noteworthy for the reason that on its roof are the remains of one of the auxiliary rotating fans, invented by Andrew Meikle in the year 1750, which, set at right angles to the sweeps, or sails, maintained them in their normal position by causing the whole roof and wind-shaft to revolve with any change of the wind. The inner mechanism of this ingenious invention can now be clearly made out in the Thringstone smock-mill through the gaps which the lapse of time has made in the series of interior floors, and the place is well worth a visit for those who are interested in the work of the old-time mill-wrights. This mill ceased working about 50 years ago (c 1880)

* Thringstone Parish was dissolved in 1936, and the smock-mill (recently restored) now stands in Swannington. For the duration of its working life however, the mill stood in Thringstone and was known as Thringstone Mill. Today it is referred to as the Hough Windmill, Swannington.

Click here For Terry Loftus' mill page.

Click here for the Swannington Heritage mill page.

Unfortunately, neither the British Library nor the Leicester Records Office hold a copy of the book by James Booth Elverston mentioned in the above text.

(Mill photograph supplied by Mr R Goacher)

Email correspondence received re Thringstone Water Mill, June 13th 2001:

My brother Mark Gregory and I were very interested to visit the Thringstone Online website, since we lived in the village during the years 1950 - 1970 and both went to the old junior school on Main Street. We were especially interested in the information on Thringstone Mill, since this was in our family for many years. Until we sold Mill Farm and associated buildings in the 1980s, it was our family home and the mill had been run by our King ancestors for many years. We are not sure exactly when the Kings (of Osgathorpe) gained possession of it, but possibly as far back as the 1700s. Our mother remembers seeing the actual mill building, so it was probably demolished in the 1920s or early 1930s. The building which still stands was the mill living quarters, with living kitchen, sitting room and two or three small bedrooms upstairs. I can remember my grandfather using the kitchen range to boil potatoes to feed the pigs, and I can remember the sitting room being used for housing pigs, and also for growing mushrooms! It cannot have been a very pleasant house to live in, since the sitting room was below ground level with the window looking out into an earth bank! A patch of land nearby was known to be the old kitchen garden.

The stream which supplied the Mill used water pumped from the mine at Swannington (or so we understood) and the stream bed was still carrying water while we lived at Mill Farm, with a very impressive waterfall in wet weather. However, at times of heavy rain and flooding, the stream bank was prone to bursting and the stream would then flow downhill into the lower stream. Initially these breaks were repaired, but eventually the stream followed its own course and the mill stream dried up.

My brother and I still own the land surrounding Mill Farm, including the old stream bed and also the surviving ditch cut for the tramway. Judging by the thoroughness of your online report, I doubt that we have any information that you don't already know, but if there is any thing you think we might be able to help with, please let me know.

Janet Bord (nee Gregory)(now living in North Wales)

Mark Gregory (now living in Warwickshire)

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