If I remember rightly from my full year of "Medieval Economic History," virtually every manor in the middle ages had a mechanically powered mill. It was frequently a legal monopoly of the local land-owner. Once a mill is built, maintenance is an annual event, since you usually only use it right after harvest time. (However, my mental image of Bryan's Orlanthi would have them start the thing up in Storm Season, like some huge prayer wheel.) I've never heard of a clutchless watermill, and I've seen a number of them, though none are medieval. If Orlanthi don't have clutches, they can just take the sails down or close the sluice.
Hand milling grain is not just boring. It is hard work that takes a really long time. This is the reason that mills were so popular and grinding grain was one of the first processes that humans subjected to mechanical power sources.
Further, turning grain into flour does not reduce its storage life (in the real world, anyway). If you have a good cooper, storing flour in barrels is much more effective against rodents than storing grain in sacks is. Spoilage from molds, mildews, etc. is also improved by storage in barrels, because most woods have mild anti-septic qualities. If you don't have a cooper, I think you're screwed, though. Perhaps pottery would work.
Here's my thoughts on the cost-benefit analysis. The benefits (in terms of avoided work) will be compared to the cost of grinding grain manually. It will be important to test the case of the steads furthest away from the mill, since they would have the highest transportation cost.
First, how much labor is required to grind, by hand, enough grain to feed a
stead of 40 people for a day? With apologies to those of you using that
foreign, communist, godless, metric system, I'm going to use US customary
liquid measures. I figure two cups of grain per person per day on average
(remembering that there are infants and children included in the average).
Eighty cups is 5 gallons of grain. (Turning it into US customary dry
measures, that's about 2 pecks or one bucket or a half bushel.) Assuming
that it is not today's nice soft Kansas wheat, but is a nuttier sort of
barley or rye, I think I could grind a gallon of grain an hour by hand.
(Getting out the blood that flowed from my knuckles might be tough, though.)
If so, grinding grain would cost my stead a half person of labor for the
entire year. Assuming a clan of 800 people, that's a cost of ten people for
the entire year. That is more than enough to justify the one time cost of
putting up a windmill, then maintaining it, and hauling your grain to it
every year.
Then, how much labor does it take to transport it? Here are my assumptions: 8 mile roundtrip*; wagon holds 32 bushels (two layers of 4 by 4); wagon travels 8 miles per hour; mills grinds grain at 4 bushels per hour. I have no idea if any of these are accurate. If they are, then one wagon team can cause 32 bushels per day to be ground. A half bushel feeds my stead for one day. There are 294 days in the Gloranthan year. Assume we have 50% more food to account for spoilage, feasts, sacrifices, and the like. This would be under 7 days work for a single wagon team. (Or three days for a group of seven wagons having to go over a hilly section of the tula with the aged priestess and your hardy heroes along for protection of the annual harvest. Can you say adventure hook?) This is compared to 147 days of work to grind it manually. Even assuming my numbers are badly off, are the going to be of by a factor of 20?
(*Assumptions: Average tula is approx 50 sq. miles per recent calculations
presented on one of these mailing lists. The clan halls, including the
mill, are near the center. The particular stead is at the edge of the tula
(since we are trying to determine if the whole clan comes). The tula is
more or less circular. Math: Take 50 sq. miles; divide by pi; take the
square root. You now have the radius of the tula. Multiply by two for
round trip.)
Feel free to critique my numbers. Though it seems like a lot of time, just think about doing laundry in Victorian times. It took Victorians a full day to do a week's laundry for an average family of 6.5. And they did not wash their outer clothes; they just brushed them clean.
Following Bryan's theme, I would think that a windmill would not be just a mechanical place. Think of the symbolism. You have the shaft coming down from the sails permanently stuck into a hole in the top of the millstone. This is symbolic of the union of Orlanth and Ernalda (sexual and social). You are there to receive the blessings of both: Ernalda's grain and Orlanth's hard work makes beautifully smooth flour. This would surely be a holy enough site that one would expect flour milled there to last longer and taste better than flour from one of those lunar slave-powered cornmeal mills in Furthest, wouldn't you?
Chris Lemens
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