The watermills of Trinity
The watermills of Trinity
Moulin de Bas before restoration
The ancient commerce of Jersey was measured not in gold or silver, but wheat, the staple crop and the most convenient way of regulating the level of trade.
It proved also to be a most effective way for the powers-that-were to levy taxes through control of the essential process that converted grain into flour; in other words, milling.
The first mills were probably built by the seigneurs of the many fiefs that were established in the wake of the Norman Conquest and were an important source of revenue for them by taking a proportion (tithe) of product
Many ancient mills in Jersey were water mills, but there were a number of windmills on higher ground from St Ouen through St Peter, Mont Mado and Rozel to Grouville.
Water mills were much more numerous on lower ground along the streams that flowed down the valleys all across the island. Trinity had only four: Moulin de Haut, Moulin de Bas, Ponterrin and Augres.
When the English Crown battled over its French lands, losing all eventually, Jersey remained under its control and many of the mills became King’s Mills whose revenue went to the ruling monarch, but none of the Trinity mills were considered sufficiently large to gain royal attention.
Like modern-day emerging green technologies, the ancient mills, being essentially of two types; wind and water, were dependent on weather and had to contend with vagaries of climate, but neither were they free of disruption by human interference.
In 1660 Josue Jennes, the miller at Ponterrin, was taken to task, not first the first or last time, by the millers downstream of him at Paul, Grands Vaux, Malassis and Prieure, for releasing water at night and swamping their mill ponds.
By the late 1700s, control of the mills had been grasped by a small number of families, often related through marriage, which created, in the view of the ‘’Gazette de Jersey’’, an ‘abominable monopoly’. Little was done to rectify this abuse, which culminated in the bread riots of 1847.
- There is no trace of Moulin de Haut which, according to old maps, was somewhere in the vicinity of Trinity Primary School at the confluence of two streams.
- Moulin de Bas is a fine house some half a mile downstream, which has a restored wheel. An engraving of 1900 shows the old wheel still intact but a later one shows only the spindles.
- Ponterrin Mill, the third on the same stream, now exists as a ruin but was established at least as early as 1066 when it is mentioned in a decree of Duke William of Normandy (the Conqueror).
- The fourth Trinity mill was Augres, which was situated in Vallee des Vaux some few hundred yards above Nicolle mill, now better known as The Harvest Barn.
Further downstream, in St Helier, was Grand Vaux mill, which took extra flow from a millpond in Trinity in the fief of Dielament.
It is odd to think that for centuries wind and water were the dynamos of the economy before becoming almost redundant, but are now, once again, although in greatly modified form, becoming one of the main sources of power taking the modern world into a sustainable future.
