Tasburgh Mill

The first mention of a mill in Tasburgh is in the Domesday Books of 1086 although it seems likely that there would have been a mill here in Saxon times. The Norman Lords who owned land in Tasburgh only owned a 60% share in the mill with Stratton appearing to have a 20% share and Rainthorpe the remaining 20%. Although Tasburgh did much later have a windmill, the first mill would have been a watermill but whether it stood on the current site seems doubtful, given the significant diversion of the River Tas from its original course along the Parish boundary that was required to power a mill on the present site. Ownership of a mill conferred important commercial control in medieval times and it is known that Tasburgh mill belonged to the Lord of the Manor of Taburgh Uphall with Boylands and Hunts. There is a record of the mill being sold by the Lord of the Manor in the second half of the 16th century along with 36 acres of land and the rents from another 11 acres.

Exactly when the present mill stream was dug and the present mill building was constructed, is unknown but the first miller for whom there is a record in Tasburgh was Robert Carre who left a will in 1559 as did a miller William Rysinge in 1640. However, from the mid 1700s until the mill closed in 1935 there is a complete list of the millers and most of the mill owners. After William and John Nickless and Robert Buck, James Reeve is recorded as the miller in 1803 and he was still running the mill as the tenant in 1816 when it was put up for auction following the death of its owner, Thomas Clabburn, who was a wealthy Norwich merchant and left a £400 legacy for the benefit of the poor of the village, equivalent to £20,000 in today's money.

As there was another 18 years left to run on his lease at a rent of £45 a year, James Reeve was able to buy the mill as the sitting tenant and then sold it the following year with vacant possession, no doubt for a good profit. The auction particulars also refer to a "substantial convenient dwelling house", no doubt the brick part of the current building which faces Low Road, with " a well planted garden, a barn, a cow house, stables and other convenient outbuildings, all in good repair and also (9.78 acres) of most excellent meadow land adjoining the premises with about 360 trees thereon".

The purchaser is believed to have been Robert Bensley, who was recorded as the owner in 1840. He was referred to as a Gentleman from Eaton, who had married the niece of James Reeve, and he let the mill to Zachariah, or Zachary, George whose father, known as King George, had been the miller at Costessey. Zachary's first wife, Mary, died in 1830, and he and his second his wife Elizabeth had no children but census records show that he employed two journeymen millers, who lived in the house with him, as well as two servants. Mr George died in 1861, and his tombstone and that of his first wife can be found together by the hedge to the west of the church. The owner Harriet Bensley, Robert's widow, then let the mill to Dennis Blomfield, and his family continued to run the mill as the tenants until 1896. In the meantime, following Harriet Bensley's death in 1867, the mill had been sold to The Honourable Frederick Walpole of Rainthorpe Hall. When the Rainthorpe estate was sold after his death to Sir Charles Harvey in 1878, the mill had four pairs of stones driven by water power and a further two pairs driven by a 6hp. steam engine. Photos of the mill taken before WW1 clearly show the boiler house and chimney standing beyond the mill building.

One of the Blomfields' apprentices was William Lant Duffield, who had been born in Tasburgh in 1869, but was shown in the 1871 census as living in Tibenham with his grandparents, probably as a result of the birth of a younger sibling. His grandfather Mr Lant was the miller there. After learning his trade back in Tasburgh, William Duffield moved to Mulbarton as assistant miller and then set up his own business at Mattishall mill before returning to Tasburgh and taking on a lease of the mill in 1896. By then the steam engine was driving a roller mill and the total output had risen to two sacks of flour an hour.

Business prospered and a year later William Duffield took on a lease of Flordon Mill and then Saxlingham Mill in 1906, but it seems he over stretched himself and after bad flooding damaged the mills in 1912 he was eventually declared bankrupt in 1916 and had to give up all three mills. However his sons had also trained as millers and in 1919 Tharston Mill was acquired by them, and then Saxlingham Mill was bought back in 1928 before the company of W L Duffield and Sons Ltd was founded in 1936 and continues to this day.

From 1916 Tasburgh mill was then let to Robert Watling and in 1925 to A E Thompson & Sons. When the Rainthorpe estate was put up for sale by auction in 1929 following the death of Sir Charles Harvey, the mill only had two pairs of French burr stones, perhaps indicating that the mill hadn't been fully restored after the 1912 floods, and there was no mention of any steam engine or boiler house. However, it seems the mill remained unsold because in 1932 it was again included in a sale of Rainthorpe properties. There was no mention of A E Thompson & Sons as tenants so presumably the mill was no longer in operation. Whether or not the property was sold at that point, by the late 1930s the property had been converted to residential use by Mr Gordon Murray Jardine. He added the Tudor style chimneys which came from a house in Tharston and the Regency front door from a house in Norwich. He also demolished some of the buildings which linked the mill barn to the mill and added opposing gable ends and a roadside wall, closing off the access to the yard from the road to create a walled garden open to the river. The property was again badly affected by flooding in 1947, and as part of the restoration a new house added to the old coach house for the gardener. The mill was then sold to a branch of the Gurney family and by the 1960s had been bought by Mr and Mrs Birchall with the mill barn being sold off for conversion in about 1974 though before that it had been fitted out and used as a squash court. Charles Birchall was the chairman of Clays, the printers in Bungay, and his wife Lesley used to give swimming lessons in their pool during the summer for some of the local children. When they retired to live in the Norwich Cathedral Close, the property was sold in the 1980s to Austin and Marianne Haines and she lived there until 2019 when the mill was eventually sold after having been on the market for three years, although she continued living in the coach house cottage for another year before that was also sold separately.

Tasburgh Windmill

In addition to its watermill, Tasburgh also had a windmill. It was a wooden postmill type and stood in what is now the back garden of Hill House on Low Road overlooking Burrfeld Park. Unlike the watermill, the construction of the windmill can be dated to about 1757 when William Nickless was granted a licence by the Lord of the Manor in respect of the windmill with an adjoining barn " recently built by him on a piece of waste land called Musted Hill" at an annual fee of one shilling each.

All the watermills along the Tas valley apart from the mill at Caistor St Edmund had a nearby windmill and the two would have been run in conjunction with each other as a single operation. The 1816 auction particulars of the watermill make reference to the windmill as forming part of the estate and operation of James Reeve. Maps from 1826 and 1834 still showed the windmill but it wasn't shown on the 1840 Tithe Apportionment when the land was referred to as Mill House Piece owned by Robert Bensley and let to Zachary George, so it seems likely that the Tasburgh windmill was demolished in the late 1830s.

Certainly by then, old postmills were being replaced with bigger and more powerful brick built tower mills as happened with the Saxlingham postmill in 1834. Tasburgh Lane, Saxlingham was originally called Mill Lane but in 1958 the brick tower was blown up with gelignite and a bungalow, Mill Stones, now stands on the site.