Archaeologists say that the earliest system for grinding corn in Britain was the saddle quern, in which a top stone was manually rubbed back and forth over a flat base stone. Saddle querns arrived in the country in about 4000 BC and remained in use for thousands of years.
From about 400 BC, came the introduction in Britain of the more-efficient beehive quern, in which a heavy, beehive-shaped top stone, with two wooden handles, was rotated over the base stone. Grain was fed into the quern through a funnel-shaped hole running through the centre of the top stone.
The Romans introduced to Britain more-industrial methods of grinding corn, using much larger round stones driven by men, animals, or water. These systems were known by the Latin word mola, which would become the English word mill, and which would eventually distinguish the form from the old hand-operated systems that were known in English as querns, from a Germanic root, which in Old English was cweorn.
Healaugh Pastures – Both a saddle and a beehive querns were found during excavations of the Romano-British settlement at Healaugh Pastures in 1988-90. For context and more information, see the page on this website Healaugh Pastures, and look in the links there, or here to the SWAAG database Settlements 1 category PDF, record 410, and Settlement 2 category PDF, record 1000.
Overview – For a 2013 overview of quern finds in Swaledale at that time, including a photo of the beehive quern at Healaugh Pastures and others in private gardens, see the SWAAG database Stone Structures category PDF, record 716. Other relevant records, entered in 2014 and 2016, are in the Archaeological Random Finds category PDF, records 827 and 930.
Hagg Farm Fremington – At the excavations of the Romano-British settlement at Hagg Farm, Fremington, several fragments of beehive quern stones were unearthed during the years 2017-2019. For more information see the page on this website Hagg Farm Fremington and open the special reports there on querns as well as the main report for the year 2017.
