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ABER-ARTH MILL AND ITS OWNERS Until the nineteenth century, the staple food of the people of Cardiganshire was meal or flour made from locally grown grain. Much corn was ground at home in hand querns; but larger mills driven by water power had been known in Britain since Roman times, and by the later Middle Ages most communities or estates in Wales had water grist mills. Landowners kept these mills firmly under their own control, obliging their tenants to use them to grind the corn they produced. Many of these estate mills had a monastic origin, in the sixteenth century or earlier. Comparatively few mills in Wales are well docu- mented before about 1500, but with the dissolution of the monasteries in 1536-9, and the ensuing redistribution of their extensive land holdings by the Crown, a whole new corpus of documents appeared, containing many references to mills. A new class of entrepreneurs, interested in acquiring and developing land, required written title to the property they would lease or purchase. Many of these sixteenth and seventeenth century estate documents survive. The story of Aber-arth Mill begins at this time; but it is also uncommonly well preserved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the archive of a small Cardiganshire estate. Aber-arth Mill was situated originally on land belonging to Strata Florida Abbey. According to the late twelfth century Charter of Rhys ap Gruffydd, property at Aber-arth and Pennant was donated to the abbey by the sons of Cadwgan and their mother Gwenllian, evidently very soon after the abbey's foundation in 1164. The Charter sets out the boundaries of the endowment, as does a confirmation of it, made by Henry VI in 1426. The monastic administration divided this land into two granges, Morfa Mawr and Anhuniog (also called at various times Henhynog or Haminiog); these divisions may have corresponded with earlier community boundaries. Morfa Mawr lay at the seaward end, roughly triangular in shape, with the river Arth upstream almost to Pennant on its south- western side, the sea coast between the Arth and the Cledan as its north- western limit, and a line from Llan-non to below Pennant as the eastern boundary. Anhuniog grange (not to be confused with the much larger commote of the same name) was rather long and narrow, straddling the Arth from its confluence with the Erthig below Pennant, upstream about as far as modern Pont Saeson and Rhos Cilcennin, with the Erthig as its southern boundary, and the low ridge north of the Arth on its northern side. An early centre of monastic rule in Anhuniog would be, presumably, at Mynachdy; while Morfa Mawr grange was probably administered