Post by humphreyclarke on Nov 18, 2010 15:03:18 GMT
Richard Carrier has - I have to say - come up with quite an ingenious argument regarding the count of the Domesday watermills. As usual he has done his homework, gone back to the primary evidence and appears to have found some flaws in the methodology. I don't have any way of checking this out beyond emailing John Langdon at the University of Alberta - which I will do shortly.
The discussion went as follows:
Flynn - OTOH, the Domesday Book lists 5,624 mills on some 9000 manors. This is not just a difference in quantity; this is a difference in kind.
Carrier - That’s a non sequitur. Since we don’t have such a survey list from antiquity, you cannot claim the numbers were then less.
It’s also factually dubious. Though this claim is repeated often, I’ve actually read the Domesday Book, and the scholarship on it: not a single watermill is ever mentioned in it. Scholars who study the book concede this. Only one word is used for “mill” and it is used of all mills of whatever type, including hand and donkey mills. Those “5,624” mills are thus not all watermills. We don’t in fact know what proportion of them actually are. The assumption is often made that when a mill’s tax is paid in eels, this indicates a watermill (as eels could be captured in its race), by which logic the number of watermills is claimed to have been close to 5,000, but since taxes are paid in eels even in towns without any mills at all, that assumption is clearly wrong. Eels just indicate a nearby stream or river. The mere fact of a nearby stream or river does not entail any of the local mills used that stream or river, much less that all of them did.
This is yet another example of how Christian apologists not only love to boost medieval Christianity with logical fallacies, but also by not checking the facts (even when they are suspicious: a watermill for every fifty families in 1086 AD England ought to have been downright suspicious), and instead just believing anything you read that makes medieval Christians sound clever.
Later I pressed him on it saying.
HC - Will do - i'm relying on 'Mills in the Medieval Economy - England 1300-1500 - John Langdon p8-9. Following the footnote he is relying on the work of H.C Darby and his team. The text of the relevant passage reads:
'As to the number of watermills and windmills in England at the beginning of the fourteenth century, we are fortunate to have the Domesday Book as a base. The number of mills (all powered by water) recorded in 1086, as calculated by H.C.Darby and his team, comes to 6,082. This is a figure that should probably be considered a minimum,since many mills were not recorded for the far north, which was not included in the survey. Both Richard Holt and I have attempted to estimate the number of watermills and windmills in England about 1300 by comparing the number of mills on manors represented both in Domesday andin documents around 1300. From doing this mainly from the Hundred Rolls of the late 1270ss and various estate surveys, Holt calculated that the number of mills about 1300 ranged between 10,000 and 12,000. From work based on West Midlands mills, I was inclined to agree with his minimum figure but thought the maximum figure might have reached as high as 15,000. Since then, I have performed a more broad-ranging comparison geographically.
Is the data in Darby Domesday England wrong? - If so can you point me to the literature on the subject?
To Which Richard replied
RC - Yes. Mills. Period. What kind of mill is never said anywhere in the DB. They only counted millstones. Not what was turning them. Just read the DB yourself.
I read Darby's work. Darby and his team argue only from the eel tax. Thus they infer a watermill count, based on a fallacious and easily-refuted premise (that a tax in eels entails a millrace which entails a watermill--easily refuted by the fact that eel taxes were paid in places where there weren't even any mills; since many a river provided ample sources for catching eels, the tax was based on natural availability of a valuable commodity, not the presence of millraces, so their inference has no basis whatever). They make zero arguments as to count of windmills, BTW (they never make any estimate of those).
See Finn's "guide" to the DB, pp. 60-61, describing their flawed methodology, although Finn simply trusts it, not noticing the fallacy it entails; in his earlier "introduction" to the DB, however, Finn concedes the data is flawed for these kinds of counts on pp. 187-90, but he doesn't realize what this entails; e.g. p. 188, a single hamlet, population 52, had "nine mills" of a total value of a single pound; these are counted as watermills by the Darby criterion, but clearly that is massively absurd, as they could not possibly have been anything of the kind; indeed, they are unlikely to have been anything more than hand mills. Similarly, Finn says Darby counts "winter mills" on the presumption that intermittent mills must be watermills, but that makes little sense: water would be low in winter, not high, so a watermill would only operate on a seasonal waterway in spring or summer, not winter; winter mills thus are more likely ordinary mills put into operation during the winter months because they were near grain storage facilities which would be left dormant during harvest seasons where grain could be ground closer to market, and the storehouses were being filled, not emptied.
Worse, even the Darby method is ignored in subsequent literature and instead of reporting their "estimate" of watermills based on eel taxes (a little over 3000), their total count of all mills (over 6000) is reported as a count of watermills! This then keeps getting repeated in the literature, when it's not even what Darby claimed, and can't possibly be even remotely correct. Not even his actual estimate can be.
Unfortunately, the source you quote isn't helpful--you have Langdon claiming he and Holt did some checking of other docs, but don't give any references. They mention the Hundred Rolls, but not which ones, or where they examined them, or where in them power source is mentioned or how it is identified (the Hundred Rolls use the same protocol as the DB, so I would expect they just list "mills" as well, not types of mills). Nor do they say where we can locate the "estate surveys" they looked at, or how they inferred power sources from them. Where have they published this count of theirs under peer review so we can assess their evidence and methods?
That's the info I need from you. Without it, I'm forced to assume they used the same method as Darby, which I've noted is fatally flawed.
What does everyone think ? - I don't happen to have access to HC Darby's work but I was wondering whether James had come across it?
The discussion went as follows:
Flynn - OTOH, the Domesday Book lists 5,624 mills on some 9000 manors. This is not just a difference in quantity; this is a difference in kind.
Carrier - That’s a non sequitur. Since we don’t have such a survey list from antiquity, you cannot claim the numbers were then less.
It’s also factually dubious. Though this claim is repeated often, I’ve actually read the Domesday Book, and the scholarship on it: not a single watermill is ever mentioned in it. Scholars who study the book concede this. Only one word is used for “mill” and it is used of all mills of whatever type, including hand and donkey mills. Those “5,624” mills are thus not all watermills. We don’t in fact know what proportion of them actually are. The assumption is often made that when a mill’s tax is paid in eels, this indicates a watermill (as eels could be captured in its race), by which logic the number of watermills is claimed to have been close to 5,000, but since taxes are paid in eels even in towns without any mills at all, that assumption is clearly wrong. Eels just indicate a nearby stream or river. The mere fact of a nearby stream or river does not entail any of the local mills used that stream or river, much less that all of them did.
This is yet another example of how Christian apologists not only love to boost medieval Christianity with logical fallacies, but also by not checking the facts (even when they are suspicious: a watermill for every fifty families in 1086 AD England ought to have been downright suspicious), and instead just believing anything you read that makes medieval Christians sound clever.
Later I pressed him on it saying.
HC - Will do - i'm relying on 'Mills in the Medieval Economy - England 1300-1500 - John Langdon p8-9. Following the footnote he is relying on the work of H.C Darby and his team. The text of the relevant passage reads:
'As to the number of watermills and windmills in England at the beginning of the fourteenth century, we are fortunate to have the Domesday Book as a base. The number of mills (all powered by water) recorded in 1086, as calculated by H.C.Darby and his team, comes to 6,082. This is a figure that should probably be considered a minimum,since many mills were not recorded for the far north, which was not included in the survey. Both Richard Holt and I have attempted to estimate the number of watermills and windmills in England about 1300 by comparing the number of mills on manors represented both in Domesday andin documents around 1300. From doing this mainly from the Hundred Rolls of the late 1270ss and various estate surveys, Holt calculated that the number of mills about 1300 ranged between 10,000 and 12,000. From work based on West Midlands mills, I was inclined to agree with his minimum figure but thought the maximum figure might have reached as high as 15,000. Since then, I have performed a more broad-ranging comparison geographically.
Is the data in Darby Domesday England wrong? - If so can you point me to the literature on the subject?
To Which Richard replied
RC - Yes. Mills. Period. What kind of mill is never said anywhere in the DB. They only counted millstones. Not what was turning them. Just read the DB yourself.
I read Darby's work. Darby and his team argue only from the eel tax. Thus they infer a watermill count, based on a fallacious and easily-refuted premise (that a tax in eels entails a millrace which entails a watermill--easily refuted by the fact that eel taxes were paid in places where there weren't even any mills; since many a river provided ample sources for catching eels, the tax was based on natural availability of a valuable commodity, not the presence of millraces, so their inference has no basis whatever). They make zero arguments as to count of windmills, BTW (they never make any estimate of those).
See Finn's "guide" to the DB, pp. 60-61, describing their flawed methodology, although Finn simply trusts it, not noticing the fallacy it entails; in his earlier "introduction" to the DB, however, Finn concedes the data is flawed for these kinds of counts on pp. 187-90, but he doesn't realize what this entails; e.g. p. 188, a single hamlet, population 52, had "nine mills" of a total value of a single pound; these are counted as watermills by the Darby criterion, but clearly that is massively absurd, as they could not possibly have been anything of the kind; indeed, they are unlikely to have been anything more than hand mills. Similarly, Finn says Darby counts "winter mills" on the presumption that intermittent mills must be watermills, but that makes little sense: water would be low in winter, not high, so a watermill would only operate on a seasonal waterway in spring or summer, not winter; winter mills thus are more likely ordinary mills put into operation during the winter months because they were near grain storage facilities which would be left dormant during harvest seasons where grain could be ground closer to market, and the storehouses were being filled, not emptied.
Worse, even the Darby method is ignored in subsequent literature and instead of reporting their "estimate" of watermills based on eel taxes (a little over 3000), their total count of all mills (over 6000) is reported as a count of watermills! This then keeps getting repeated in the literature, when it's not even what Darby claimed, and can't possibly be even remotely correct. Not even his actual estimate can be.
Unfortunately, the source you quote isn't helpful--you have Langdon claiming he and Holt did some checking of other docs, but don't give any references. They mention the Hundred Rolls, but not which ones, or where they examined them, or where in them power source is mentioned or how it is identified (the Hundred Rolls use the same protocol as the DB, so I would expect they just list "mills" as well, not types of mills). Nor do they say where we can locate the "estate surveys" they looked at, or how they inferred power sources from them. Where have they published this count of theirs under peer review so we can assess their evidence and methods?
That's the info I need from you. Without it, I'm forced to assume they used the same method as Darby, which I've noted is fatally flawed.
What does everyone think ? - I don't happen to have access to HC Darby's work but I was wondering whether James had come across it?
