Heortling Mills

From: Andrew Barton <AndrewBarton_at_...>
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2001 09:37:08 -0500


> I seem to recall one of the reasons for feudal lords *insisting* on you
using
their mill was that you had to grind a fair amount of grain to make it a worthwhile investment (and greed of course).

The way I heard it, the main reason was that forcing the peasants to use the mill made it much easier to extort taxes - they had to bring their entire harvest to a central point. IIRC correctly, serfs had to pay 'the third grain' on what they ground. Querns were illegal.

> Gears are tricky to make at the best of times, even
harder in a society with no arithmetic or value for pi (unless there is a little know cult of Lankhor My the mathemetician?).

It's a fallacy that you need to know a good numerical value for pi to make things. -Constructing- a line with the length ratio pi to another line is easy - build a cylinder then roll it through one revolution. Dividing a circle into n parts where n is a power of two is also very simple.

Anyway, the ancient Greeks had a good value for pi and knew of both the common approximation of 22/7 and the more accurate 355/113. I see no reason why the Westerners at least shouldn't be able to do this sort of calculation.

In the Player's Book, Mathematics is listed as a mental skill for Buserian.

Andrew

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