The remains of a large Anglo-Saxon multiple watermill have been found in the River Tyne near Corbridge in Northumberland. Dated to the 8th-10th centuries by radiocarbon tests, it seems to have consisted of three (or perhaps four) timber mills working together in parallel, set on stone foundations on the bed of the river.
The Corbridge mill is one of only about half a dozen mills known in Britain which had horizontal mill wheels, all dating from the late Anglo-Saxon period, but it is the only multiple mill among them. In size, it is paralleled in the Anglo-Saxon period only by a triple vertical- wheeled mill at Old Windsor in Berkshire, possibly dating from the late 7th century. The mill lies close to the ruins of a Roman stone bridge, which had once carried Dere Street to the Roman settlement at Corbridge; and stones from the bridge were re-used in the mill’s foundations. Roman Corbridge had been abandoned at the end of the Roman period, and a new Anglo-Saxon settlement lay about a mile downstream.
Little is known at present of Anglo-Saxon Corbridge; but according to one of the excavators, Margaret Snape of Tyne and Wear Museums, the size of the mill, and its distance from the settlement, suggests Corbridge was a major regional centre at the time. `This is really a very big milling complex; and if it was surrounded by Corbridge’s farmland – as it was in the later medieval period – then the Anglo-Saxon settlement had a very large area of common land,’ she said.
The remains of the mill consist of three flat, level stone platforms next to one another, separated by timber sill-beams containing mortices for timber walls and sockets for water chutes. According to the excavators, there may originally have been a fourth platform, which has now disappeared.
The platforms had previously been interpreted as a medieval quay, but detailed inspection last year showed they bore a close resemblance to elements of the Anglo-Saxon mill at Tamworth in Staffordshire. The platforms are thought to have been basements for two-storey mills, with the mill-wheel in the basement and the mill-stone on the upper floor.
The new interpretation was strengthened by the discovery of a mill chute, 4.5m long, for directing a jet of water from the mill-pond at the wheel. The chute was found on the riverbed in the centre of the stream, wedged underneath a boulder, and has not yet been recovered. A row of stakes on the landward side of the platforms has been identified as the revetted side of a millpond.
