Imagine you live in Europe in the year 1500. Your village has fifty families, most of whom are farmers, but there are also a few tradespeople, including a blacksmith, a carpenter, and weavers.
Because of a recent serious event, perhaps a forest fire, an outbreak of disease, or a war, the villagers have decided to move to a new location. The new site, presently undeveloped forest, is similar to the one you’ve abandoned, except that the new village has a fast-flowing creek running through the middle of it.
All of your homes, shops, and farms are within the creek’s watershed, meaning that all of the land area drains into your creek.
Later in this lesson, you will be asked to design your new village, and predict how its use of waterpower will affect the residents. To get a better idea how waterpower was used in pre-industrial Europe, how its use changed settlement patterns and the environment, and how these changes led to conflicts, read the descriptions of Early Uses, Later Uses, Easing Labor and Effects on the Environment.
As you read each of the sections describing how the use of water in pre-industrial Europe changed, think about the following:
How might the presence of this creek affect life for you and the other villagers?
Will it impact the farmers more, less, or differently than it might the tradespeople?
How might the village change over the next generation because of the creek?
How might the creek change in that time because of the presence of the village?
Click on a tab to display information on the descriptions.
EARLY USES
People have always settled near creeks and rivers to use the water for drinking, bathing, cooking, and transportation. The earliest use of water as a power source in pre-industrial Europe was for milling, which is the grinding and crushing of grains such as wheat or barley between two large stones.
The early mills were built around very simple water wheels, which used the power the water exerted as it flowed downstream to turn the mill stones. These small mills were easily built and operated, often used by only one family. In most cases, the mills were only used seasonally after the family’s crops were harvested. The mills processed the grains grown by one family and perhaps their neighbors and were almost never used by farmers who lived far away.
These mills were relatively inefficient, at least compared to later designs, but that did not matter since the waterpower was free, and the farmers were milling grains that they or their own animals were going to eat, not producing processed grain for sale. To give you an example of how commonplace these early mills were, there were more than 5,000 in England alone in the 11th century.
LATER USES
During the Middle Ages, the use of waterpower expanded to other trades and industries. Weavers used water-driven looms to ease their labor, and leather workers used waterpower in the tanning and brushing of hides. Carpenters used axles turned by water wheels to drill, sand, and saw; in addition, the manufacture of paper was made simpler through the harnessing of waterpower.
Even large industries were affected; for instance hydraulic pressure generated by water wheels was used to pump the excess water out of flooded mine shafts, and conveyer belts driven by waterpower were used to carry coal out of mines up to the surface. Perhaps the most important development during this time was the use of waterpower to create much more force than a single person could in order to pound large hammers against cooling metals to create harder, stronger tools and weapons.
EASING LABOR
All of these applications of waterpower allowed work to be done faster, more reliably, and on a larger scale than had been previously possible. For instance, before waterpower was used, weavers turned their looms by continuously pressing a pedal with their foot, a process that inevitably turned the loom at uneven speeds and resulted in the weaver tiring after only a couple of hours of work. Once waterpower was used to turn the looms, these limitations were removed, and the weavers could do a better job for a much longer length of time.
For another example of how waterpower allowed work to be done faster and better, ask yourself how coal got out of the mine shafts before there were water-driven conveyor belts or, how heavy is your backpack?
EFFECTS on the ENVIRONMENT
A consequence of work being done faster and better was that instead of one or two families in each village doing all of the weaving or blacksmithing for that village, with another tradesperson laboring similarly down the road in his or her village, the trades became concentrated. Over time, certain villages became known for having many of the same kinds of skilled workers, and if you wanted to purchase a manufactured item, an axe for example, you would travel to a town with many blacksmiths and find exactly the size, shape, and quality of axe you wanted.
Often these tradesmen used the same water source for their power, creating conflict over the rights to it and concentrating negative effects such as pollution at these locations. We do not often think about pre-industrial peoples creating very much pollution, but consider how the dyes used on fabrics or the solutions used to soften and tan leather or the chipped wood from the saw mills would affect the ecology of a stream or river.
In addition to concentrating the industries in specific locations, the increased use of waterpower meant that water wheels were being used year-round, often 12 hours a day, six days a week, which constantly disrupted the flow of the water in the stream or creek. In time, the course of the water was permanently changed, and the plant and animal life that depended on the river either adjusted to the change or died. In addition humans have found alternative, faster forms of transportation.
