Historical Development of the Windmill - Wind Turbine Technology: Fundamental Concepts of Wind Turbine Engineering - page 12

The Horizontal-Axis European Windmill
Northwest Europe, particularly France, Germany, Great Britain, Iberia, and the Low
Countries, eventually became the region that developed the most effective type of windmill,
one in which the shaft carrying the sails was oriented horizontally rather than vertically as
in the Persian mill. In a relatively short time, tens of thousands of what we will call
horizontal-axis European windmills were in use for a variety of duties. The familiar
cruciform pattern of their sails prevailed for almost 800 years, from the twelfth to the
twentieth century.
The Domesday topic registers between 5,000 and 6,000 mills in England by A.D. 1086,
but without distinguishing among kinds of mills, whether hand, animal, water, or wind, so
the last of these cannot be assumed to have been in use. For many years, the irst windmill
in the West was believed to have been located near Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk, England,
because of its unimpeachable provenance from the famous Chronicle of Jocelin of
Brakelond , which dealt with the affairs of the abbey, and because of the widespread
knowledge of that text from Thomas Carlyle's “Past and Present,” which was based on the
Chronicle. The story told there is that of Dean Herbert, who in 1191 built a windmill on
glebe land. Glebe signiies land attached to an ecclesiastical beneice controlled by the lord
of the manor, in this case the Abbot Samson who made the Dean tear the mill down.
Diligent and patient scholarship, however, has uncovered the unqualiied existence of
other mills of about the same period, c. 1180 to 1190. There are some half-dozen of these:
two in France, three in Britain, and one in Syria. There is some disagreement or doubt as
the exact year of some; hence, the hesitancy about the dating. Including the Syrian mill
may appear to be irregular in an account of windmill development in Northwest Europe,
but the following verse will explain this. White [1962] gives us an eyewitness account
(from 1190) of the Third Crusade, which states
“The German soldiers used their skill
to build the very irst windmill
that Syria had ever known”
Apart from its early date, this verse is important for another reason, which we will discuss
shortly.
The provenances of these windmills have been the few acceptable ones until quite
recently, when two monographs on medieval mills in England have appeared. That of
Kealey [1987] explores the social context of a technological revolution, and his information
comes mainly from the inancial records of landowners of that time. Technical details are
almost non-existent for the period, but he does register mill locations, irst datable
appearances, sponsors, owners, and lessees. He asserts evidence of some 56 horizontal-axis
windmills, all before the year 1200, including those he dates earlier than 1185 and one as
far back as 1137. A second monograph by Holt [1988], who has made a very considerable
contribution pertaining to medieval windmills in England, criticizes many of Kealey's
evidences as unsound. Holt says there are only 23 English windmills irmly dated before
the year 1200, nine of them newly identiied by Kealey. Of these 23, three are irmly dat-
ed in the 1180's (none earlier than about 1185), 15 in the 1190's, and the remaining ive
before 1200. With this number of mills, it seems reasonable to regard England as the origin
of the horizontal-axis windmill, rather than the Middle or Far East as is thought by some.
At the end of the following century, windmills were becoming common in Northwest
Europe, but little or no penetration is known elsewhere; in the fourteenth century, they were
a major source of power. In spite of the vagaries of the wind, the many appropriate sites
for the mills allowed much more lexibility of application than did water mills. Numbers