Millstreams: Domesday Mill Places, Modern Traces of Mills and the Textile Mills that Went Elsewhere

Domesday Book recorded England's mills manor by manor in 1086. Because a watermill needs a particular site and its dam and channels are costly to move, mill places are a natural test of how long the use of a place persists. I sum the mills in every Domesday entry as coded by the Hull Domesday Project, which gives 6,172.25 mills in 4,160 entries, and set the 3,390 places with a mill against three modern traces of mills: OpenStreetMap and Wikidata mill buildings, and Ordnance Survey names containing the word Mill. Within 1 km, 4.8% of Domesday mill places have a mapped watermill today, against 1.2% of the 8,502 other Domesday places, 4.7 times the rate expected from places of similar size in the same county. With county fixed effects and controls for size, distance to a watercourse and local relief, the odds ratio is 3.59 (95% interval 2.62 to 4.92), and the rate rises with the number of mills recorded. Windmills, which postdate the survey, show no such link (odds ratio 0.75), which suggests that the result reflects persistent water-power sites rather than settlement size or mapping effort. At county level the association is weak (Spearman 0.30). The textile mills of the Industrial Revolution recorded in Wikidata (113 in England) lie a median 20.4 km from the nearest Domesday mill place, against 1.6 km for mapped watermills, chiefly because they cluster in the North West, where Domesday recorded almost no mills. The results are traces in uneven open data, not a census of mills. Interactive version: https://tristan-hotham.github.io/domesday-mills/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/domesday-mills. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/28/domesday-mills/.