From Domesday mill to pub: The history of Town Mills

How many times the mill has been rebuilt since that time is difficult to ascertain, nor what any earlier ones looked like but the present building has some antiquity, with the mill building itself being reconstructed in 1764 by millwright John Gibbs, while the slightly older miller’s residence next door is from 1752, built at the expense of local MP Sir John Griffin Griffin when the bailiff (or mayor) of Andover was John Pugh.

Plaques on the front of the two adjacent buildings record these events.

The Town Mills, not long before its closure as a mill, c.1965. (Image: Jeffery Saunders)

The radical, William Cobbett, wrote in his Rural Rides of 1830 that 'Andover is a neat and steady town. It is entirely supported by the agriculture around it'.

And so, it had been from earliest times when the produce of the fields, as well as the wool from local sheep, had been the mainstay of life in the area.

Most of the farms were occupied by tenant farmers and the corn produced was taken to the mill to be ground into flour by the local miller.

Generally, the mills were the property of the lord of the manor or the governing corporation as the building of a mill was too expensive for the tenant farmers to contemplate themselves; millstones were very bulky and needed to be bought from abroad, and they also needed to be renewed as they wore down.

The tolls were a fixed levy according to the weight of grain, and woe betide any miller who tried to charge more than he should.

The Town Mill occupant John Lytelmulward was in 1379 hauled before the local Hundred Court for charging an 'unjust toll'.

Some two hundred years later, in 1596, William North of Andover was found to have charged the value of 7lbs worth of milling for a bushel of corn, which weighed only 2lbs. He was fined 3s 4d.

Another fine of 5/- was paid by North and another miller John Adlett, who illegally kept pigs and fowls on their premises.

These ate 'the grain of Her Majesty’s subjects, which is brought to be ground'.

As Andover was a royal manor until at least 1175, the Town Mill was initially owned by the king.

Once Andover had become a fully-fledged borough by virtue of the successive charters which granted the town its independence, a body known as the Gild Merchant governed the town.

It was in essence a collection of the leading men, 24 in number, who themselves elected two bailiffs each year.

The Gild administered town property, local justice and set trading standards and rules by which everyone was supposed to abide.

Later, in 1599, the Great Charter which collected together all the rights of previous charters, created a corporation of men on largely the same basis as before.

The corporation 'owned' the town and granted leases of town properties, set rents and held court sessions.

The town’s archives list the various leases granted by the corporation from which we can see how the Town Mill evolved and who ran it.

In 1510, after being town property for centuries, the Gild Merchant sold the site of the mill to one Richard Asheton.

At that time, it was described as a vacant place, so clearly the mill building had fallen down, suffered from a devastating fire or even perhaps succumbed to a raging river.

Selling it off with a proviso that Richard Asheton rebuilt it was the Gild’s solution to the unwanted expense of rebuilding themselves.

Asheton’s rebuilding seems to mark the date when it became Town Mills plural, in that there were two mills under one roof, one for wheat (flour) and one for barley (malt).

By 1613, the Gild Merchant had been replaced by the corporation and it bought back the mill for £170 from the then owner.

The corporation had recently received something of a windfall when it was shown that the capital sum of money left to the grammar school by Richard Blake had never been handed over by the Blake family; they had merely paid over the annual interest, whereas the corporation had the right to invest the capital as well.

Substantial work was needed on the building in 1644 when it was leased to Winchester miller Robert Delamayne.

He paid £32 for his lease but was remitted £12 cash plus eight tons of timber, three elm planks and a 23ft beam for repairs.

In 1657, a new miller was given the contract to supply the poor of the town 28 two-penny loaves every Sunday which were long-standing bequests from the Venables and Kemis charities.

This contract was awarded to whoever was the occupier of the Town Mill and lasted for some 250 years until the early 20th century, when presumably two-penny loaves were superseded by payments in cash.

In 1904, the corporation had long been replaced by a town council and the mill was sold once more.

Elijah Hoare, a Shalbourne farmer, occupied the mill on a yearly tenancy from 1894 at £50 per annum before taking out a lease from the council in 1901.

At Hoare’s request, the council agreed to sell it outright, Hoare paying £1,200 for the freehold.

He ran the mill for the next 20 years or so with his two sons, one of whom ran a wheelwright and carriage works on part of the unused site.

The final occupants of the working mill were the family of Charles Albert King who was born in 1887 at North Stoke, just south of Wallingford.

He married Constance Caroline Wheeler at Chippenham in 1909 and by 1911 was a corn merchant’s manager, living at St Paul’s Street there.

Ten years later he had progressed to having his own mill at West Lydford, Somerset.

In 1926, he bought the Andover mill from Elijah Hoare.

By this period local demand for milled flour and malt produced by its local mills had seriously declined.

The brewing industry had been decimated by larger firms buying up local breweries during the early 20th century, and the arrival of McDougal’s, the industrial flour millers, at the same time, meant that the small millers had to change.

The solution was provender – animal foods from grain, peas, beans and seeds – and C A King and Son specialised in this, as well as supplying hay and straw for animal bedding.

Indeed, it was Charles’ eldest son, Cecil John King, who was living on site at the Town Mill from the early 1930s and in virtual control of the business.

By 1939, the mill was running on electricity.

Cecil King retired in 1968 and the mill was briefly used by Crosfield’s Farm Foods (Southern) Ltd before being closed and disused.

The mill house became a dental surgery by 1970, followed by a succession of other uses.

Eventually the mill building was renovated and restored and is now a thriving pub and restaurant called the Town Mills, with the old white painted signage of C A King and Son once again emblazoned across the frontage.

If you are interested in local history, why not join Andover History and Archaeology Society? Details can be found at andoverlocalhistoryarchaeology.uk.