At long last I’m replaying Kingdom Come Deliverance, and I’m having a blast. When you play as the miller’s daughter Teresa in the DLC A Woman’s Lot, many of the people you interact with trust you with less than legal activities and information on the basis of “you’re the Miller’s daughter”. When silver goes missing from the mine your family is the first to be questioned, on the basis of “well, you’re millers.”
Is there any historical basis for this? Were millers generally considered less trustworthy or more prone to criminal activity than other parts of Medieval European society? Why?
This reputation was bound up with the multure, a toll a tenant brings to the miller, either a proportion of the grain itself or a monetary tax. Dennis Bartel's article "From Handmills to Windmills: Technology Gatekeeping in Medieval Europe and Contemporary Ontario" states that--because lords would receive this multure--peasants and serfs were prohibited from using mills not owned by the lord or the millers he had delegated the work to. Therefore, millers had the power to overcharge their clients, or to adulterate the grain they received to be milled.
He cites a medieval riddle: "What is the boldest thing in the world? A miller’s shirt, for it clasps a thief by the throat daily", as indicating the popular contemporary perspective that millers were cheats. Chaucer also reflects a similar sentiment in describing the Miller in the General Prologue of his Canterbury Tales as:
"a langlere and a goliardeys,
And that was most of sinne and harlotryes.
Wel coude he stelen corn, and tollen thryes;
And yet he hadde a thombe of gold, pardee" (561-563)
The Riverside Chaucer (ed. by Larry D. Benson) glosses this as meaning that the Miller is a teller of dirty stories (as his tale later evidences) and a buffoon, who steals grain and takes his toll (payment) three times, thereby overcharging peasants. The reference to "a thombe of gold" is to a contemporary proverb that an honest miller has a thumb of gold. Benson interprets this as being an ironic reference (that an honest miller would be as rare as a thumb of gold), although the link above offers some alternative glosses, such as meaning that the miller was skilled enough at his craft that he did not need to cheat his customers to grow rich--a compliment to this particular miller, but not to his profession at large, which we see by and large caricatured as a dishonest bunch.