Dee Mills

The weir was built in sandstone in 1093 for Hugh of Avranches. It was designed to provide a head of water for mills on the River Dee. and to improve navigation above the weir. Hugh granted a tithe on the mills for the benefit of the Benedictine Abbey of St Werburgh (now Chester Cathedral), which he had founded in 1092. Throughout the centuries the weir has been used to power corn, fulling, needle-making, snuff and flint mills.



Roman Mills
The Romans are known to have had a tile-works upriver at Holt and a Roman quay was found at Heronbridge during excavations by Chester Archaeological Society in 2001 where the natural watercourse met the ancient river cliff. This is thought to date from around AD130. It has been suggested that the River Dee was originally not navigable between Chester and Heronbridge and therefore that the Romans landed tiles at Heronbridge and brought them overland to Chester.


 * "The river of Dee was drawn unto the said cittie with great charge by the said Earle or some of his predecessors before the Conquest, from the anciente course it held before, a myle or two distant from the cittie, and a passage cut out of the rock under the walls of the said cittie"

This could be a reference to work on the River Dee upstream of the present weir to improve navigation, particularly during prolonged dry spells. The weir would also help by holding back water and maintaining depth. The survival of millstones of appropriate size suggests that there may have been Roman power mills at Chester, but there is no evidence from archaeology of a Roman mill at Chester itself. There may have been a mill at Heronbridge as excavation reports mention "traces of workshops involving bronze- and iron-working, a dock flanked by quay sides, corn drying on a large scale and a stream bed artificially deepened and revetted". With all of this activity, in addition to domestic premises, it is not surprising that a millstone fragment was claimed to have been found in 1933, although this is barely and confusingly reported without any detailed context as:


 * "Charcoal, coal, window and bottle-glass, slag and lava of mill-stone were found".

Possible symptoms of a Roman mill yes, but still no positive identification of an actual watermill.

The Roman granaries were located near the Roman harbour gate, suggesting that the bulk of the grain arrived by river. Nowadays this is a site found between Watergate Street and Commonhall Street, bounded to the west by Weaver Street and to the east by Old Hall Place (this includes the former site of the offices of the Chester Chronicle). Bulk shipments of food, especially grain, had to be shipped by water wherever possible, given that the cost of overland transport, (at least according to the transport tariffs cited in Diocletian’s Edict on Maximum Prices) would quickly become unsustainable for such large quantities of cargo. The payload capacity of most Roman freighter-ships of the period was in the range of 10,000–20,000 modii (70–140 tons).

Typically, a Roman garrison would store some six months worth of grain, and analysis of sewage from latrines indicates the legionary diet was mainly grain-based. Indeed grain, provided as part of a soldier’s government-issued rations, is the only component of the military diet for which an amount is specifically cited, and based on this it seems that a soldier’s grain ration (about 1.5kg) composed approximately 60-75% of his daily food supply (although a Roman soldier’s daily meat ration contained almost twice the calories-per-gram of his grain ration), and baking bread would have possibly been a daily task for the members of the garrison at Chester. In fact, part of a roman soldier’s equipment was a small skillet to bake bread.

Norman Mills
Watermills were simpler to construct than windmills and were developed at an earlier date. By the time of the Domesday Book (1086), which records over 5,000 watermills (some clearly long-established), almost all communities had easy access to one. Nothing is known of the location of the mills in Chester prior to the Normans, when the Mills of the River Dee were first mentioned in 1093. Earl Richard of Avranches, gave little to Chester's Benedictine abbey during his short earldom; apart from the grant of a mill on Flookersbrook at Bache, which might suggest that a mill existed there before the Norman Conquest.

The Norman corn mills were located at the Chester end of the weir or causeway just west of the Old Dee Bridge, a site now occupied by a former hydroelectric generating station. Although almost certainly they were always controlled by the secular authorities, Earls Hugh I and Richard apparently intended that they should include a mill for Chester abbey. Under the Earls of Chester (Northgate Street excepted) the custom of "Soke Rights" required all citzens (excepting the occupants of the Abbey and other religious houses) to take their corn to the Earl's mills to be ground. Under "Soke Rights" all grain grown on the lord’s estate had to be ground at the lord’s corn mill and owning querns and hand mills was forbidden. Although the “Right of Soke” was never written in law, it was commonly practised in Britain – and throughout Europe – until the 16th century, even after the country had moved away from feudalism.

From earliest times the mills were exceptionally valuable. In 1237 (when there were six mills) they were leased for the enormous sum of £100, half the earl's revenue from the entire city and over twenty times that for most other mills of the period. That the figure nevertheless reflected genuine income is suggested by the large sums which the king received when the mills were administered directly in 1237. The earl's rights probably bore heavily on the inhabitants, for at Earl John Canmore's death in 1237 the mills were destroyed by the citizens, despite the fact that they were themselves lessees of one mill for an annual rent of two tuns of wine.

Although the king rented out the mills in the first year after the annexation of the earldom, thereafter they returned to royal hands, perhaps because damage sustained in 1237 had reduced their profitability. Certainly the revenues in 1238–9 were well below the earlier annual rental value. In 1241, however, the mills were repaired out of the revenues of the county, (fn. 14) and thereafter profits probably increased. (fn. 15) By 1245 they were again leased, to Roger of Mold, steward of Chester.

Richard the Engineer
In the early 1270s the mills were leased to Richard the engineer. When he renewed the lease for five years in 1275 Richard was charged £140 a year, and in addition was to maintain the mills and causeway at his own cost. By 1279 he was evidently in arrears, and the king considered granting the mills to his new monastic foundation of Vale Royal. In 1281, however, Richard received a fresh three-year grant of the mills together with the Dee fishery for the very large annual sum of £200. The grant was renewed in 1284 for twelve years, and by 1300 Richard had been made lessee of the Dee Mills, fishery, and bridge for life.

Millers of Dee
Under the Earls of Chester (Northgate Street excepted) the custom of "Soke Rights" required all citzens (excepting the occupants of the Abbey and other religious houses) to take their corn to the Earl's mills to be ground. In addition to this monopoly, the Dee millers were known to take a quantity of grain from each sack. The millers were often accused of taking more than their legal due and for centuries after, to call someone a 'Miller of Dee' was considered a serious insult, implying dishonest trading practices.

The Gamuls
The Dee Mills passed through many hands, the most notorious being the Gamuls in the 17th century - the same Gamuls who required those supplied with water to purchase flour at their mills. The weir is known to have collapsed at least once in 1601, as recorded in a:


 * Copie of a Letter from Hugh Glaseour Mayor & the Aldermen of Chester to the Lords of the Privy Councill dated 29 December 1602 advertising that a Breach above 20 yards broad & 18 foot deep had been made in the middle of the Cawsey the last yeare by the Violence of the Waters whereby the going of Dee Milnes was stopped and all whose living depended on them in a fair way to be ruined And that Mr Edmund Gamull Fermor of the Corn Milles there had out of his own purse expended above £500 in repairing the said Cawsey but that it would require above £400 more to finish the same



George Skene (9 May 1749 – 27 April 1825) a Scottish soldier and politician (and also an alcoholic and member of the anti-Tory Whig party), wished Chester in 1729 and wrote as follows:


 * Septr. 20th, 1729. Rot. Walker having forgot my book of the Road with my Grand-Unkle Will's picture done by himself in litho, we stay'd this day at Chester, this being the chief port & Leverpool only an under branch, tho' more trade, the Collector of Leverpool will be worth 300 Libs. Sterl. a year, no vessel of any burthen can come up now tho' of old they did to the brige, and there is a tower call'd the water tower from thence, now the channel is so fill'd up, that they come in 8 miles down & the goods brought in carts & smallel vessels. There was a Dutch man offer'd to clean it & make it navigable for ships of any burthen only to give him the land he shou'd winn off the River, this was rejected most foolishly because said they the Dutch wou'd build on that betwixt us & the sea, what then they must be English subjocts, they have been at a vast work to straighten the channel thinking thereby to make it deeper & have off a large meadow where they keep a horse race, tho Spring tide which come up here above brige and keep'd off by a bank rais'd which makes a pretty walk & the whole banks of the River lin'd by five or six rows of oaken stakes driven in. Just above tho bridge is a dam which squints up to the other side a great way and the water coming over it makes a fall like that of London Bridge at low water, this dam makes nine corn mills go on this side and the paper mills on the other, each wheel makes two corn mills to go, but not both at once, when the hopper is empty they have a weak thin iron spring in the bottom with a pack threed fastened to tho end which goes thro' and is fastened to little boll which is hung near a stick with a pin in it, which stick & pin turns with the stone, when the corn is in, it presses the spring so as make the pack threed pull the boll to a side, when it is empty the spring comes to its place and lets the boll fall even which then is struck by the pin of the stick that turns round with the stone, and so rings, untill they put in there corn, which weight pushes down the spring and the boll out of the way of the stick, a very fine device to cause tell when the hopper's empty. This being mercate day at Chester the wheat sold at 4 1/2 shills, sterl. per measure or bushell which all summer had been nine and ten shillings. Here they are all Torys.

Eventually the enterprising Mr Edward Ommaney Wrench, owned the mills (by then including a "Snuff and Tobacco Mill") and after a serious fire in 1819, decided to move their business to a disused cotton mill in Boughton by the canal - "The Steam Mill" - where they used the newly discovered steam-engine for milling. This was not the first fire at the Mills, Fletcher records:


 * 1789: This year the Dee mills were burnt down. Whether the fire happened from accident or design is not known tho many suppose the latter. On the lite of these mills the present extensive ones were erected said to be inferior to none in the kingdom. These valuable mills are the property of Edward Ommaney Wrench Esq and are now leased by Mr Whittle of this city, brewer.



They prospered in Steam Mill Street, and expanded the mills until they became one of the largest milling firms in the country. The Wrench family were the last owners of the Dee Mills and held them until 1895. In April 1895, the Dee Mills, were purchased by Chester Corporation, only to sustain serious damage a month later in the last of a long series of fires, after which they were closed. The buildings were used for storage until they were demolished in 1910.