Arrabona - Múzeumi közlemények 40/1-2. (Győr, 2002)
Tanulmányok - Csiszár Attila: Vízimalmok a Kis-Rábán
ARRABONA40.2002. TANULMÁNYOK Attila Csiszár: Mills on the Little Raab The Little Raab, a straggling branch leaving the Old Raab at Nick, used to feed the marshes of Hanság. Due to its confluence with the Repce it is called Rábca, and it joins again the Old Raab at Győr. Tts role in economics was always significant throughout the Middle Ages. Its relatively great fall provided sufficient energy for the operation of mills. Once there were ten mills along the river between Beled and Kapuvár. Constructing mills was regarded as the craftsmanship that required the most specialised skills. The mills were always built with the materials and by the techniques that characterised folk architecture of a given district; along the Raab they might have been built of earthen walls or of wattle work with foot and frame. The buildings of special requirements were provided by independent peasant carving masters and the millers themselves who were the most excellent craftsmen of the technology of carpentry and woodwork. In the 19 l century, the old or destroyed mills of less enduring material were replaced by solid buildings of stone or brick. The mills along the Little Raab were of two storeys in rectangular or L shape. Water mills and their supplementary operative extensions (canals, sluices, ponds, etc.) were the products of the peasant, rural craftsmanship of high standard, in fact, they preserved the technological skills of European feudalism and that of the late Middle Ages within the limits of folklore, at some places until the middle of the 20* century. Mills had a special economic and legal status during the Middle Ages, and complicated legal customs evolved in connection with their operation. These are revealed by the sources, court documents, tenancy contracts, etc. of the \7 X -19 centuries. The group of millersasa professional body formed a prestigious and important social layer, their guilds in Hungary were formed from the middle of the 16* century, however, most of them were established during the 17 L and 18 l centuries. The guild of the millers working in the mills along the Raab, the Repce and the Ikva was given its privileges by Miklós Esterházy in 1613. The millers of the area along the Raab - referring to their different grievances -became separated from the millers' guild of Csepreg, and established their own guild. The milling industry in the area along the Raab was decisively influenced by the regulations of the Old Raab in the last quarter of the 19 century. The primary cause of the repeated floods was attributed to the mill-dams, which blocked the bed, and which hindered the free subsiding of floods; mill-dams also advanced siltation. The first action of the Association for the Regulation of the Raab - which was established in 1873 - was to demolish the mills and mill-dams along the Old Raab. This action did not include the mills along the Little Raab. By the second half of the 19 1 century the traditional grinder system of mills became out of date. From the end of the 19 century onwards the mills along the Little Raab meeting local needs were also modernised: water-wheels were replaced by hydro-electric generators, and grinding stones were replaced by modern trains of rolls. These still worked for a period after nationalisation (1948), some of them were used for other purposes (Beled, Kapuvár), most of them, however, decayed in the past decades (Vica, Mihályi, Kisfalud, Babot) without any survey or documentation concerning their grinding structure that represented values of in the history of technology, or the constructions of mills that belonged organically to the landscape and the character of these villages. 302
