Roughlee/Carr mills

[Stanley]

Roughlee/Carr mills
Sue, all I know about the Hargreaves is in the Hargreaves Diary which is transcribed and on the site.  That should give you some clues.  As always, the first port of call for anything that side of the hill is BJ and Christine at Colne library.  Thanks for the two Halmote court references, they will go in the watermill index. 
As for your questions.....  As usual there is no simple answer!  Let's have a look at Carr Mill first because it is a good example and throws up some clues about Roughlee.  Doreen Crowther did a lot of research on watermills for me and she reckoned that Carr Mill was built c.1533.  Father Smith's papers reinforce this because he says that in 1500 the Towneleys of Barnside held the land at Carr Hall, Lawrence Towneley built the mill and got it on permanent lease from the King.  In 1544 he was given the right of multure by the King (in other words he could force people within the vicinity of the mill to use it and pay charges) In 1554 L T's tenancy was confirmed by the Crown and in 1547 a right of way to the mill was Granted to LT.  The rent for the lease in 1608/09 was £1.
Now this is where you have to start looking sideways and asking questions:  Why did LT build a mill in 1533?  What had it got to do with the King?  Why were there so many legalities surrounding the mill?  Surely LT had access to a mill before 1533?
The answers to these questions are of course even more complicated!  Notice the date, 1533 and recognise that a lot was going on in England in terms of property transfer, the Dissolution of the monasteries.  The Crown was stripping the large religious estates and having a fire sale of the assets.  The nobility and Minor Gentry weren’t slow to act and I'd say that in this climate of expansion and business activity Lawrence made his move.  Until the mid-sixteenth century there were only four classes of mills, Royal, Monastic, Manorial and Pirate.  The Dissolution threw the monastic mills on the market but many of these were in the wrong place, they were built to serve the religious community and any spin-off to the public was accidental.  At the same time the population in the NW of England was rising for the first time since the Black Death a century earlier.  Plenty of evidence for enclosures of the waste in this area, a sure sign of pressure on land resources.  See the map of Whitemoor for early enclosures for Foulridge, Colne and Barlick.  More land means more corn to grind as it was all locally produced and the existing mills couldn't cope.  See Calendar of Lancashire Documents on the site for evidence of court cases over pirate mills at this time, many were built, some were allowed to continue under annual fine but some were forcibly demolished.  At the same time we suspect that there was a mini-warming of the climate.
So, 1533 was a good time to build a mill and Carr Mill is a good example of all these forces coming together.  (I suspect that this is the time Barlick corn mill was built as the existing manorial mill at Bracewell couldn't cope.  I also suspect that Woodend Mill on County Brook was a pirate mill but have no evidence) 
Back to Roughlee.  'BRADLEY MILL. NELSON
In 1454 a licence was granted to Sir Richard Towneley of Towneley Hall Burnley to erect and run a corn mill. 17 June 1533 Inquisition refers to the mill at Bradley and rights of way for tenants from Roughlee and Pendle Forest to get to the Manorial Mill at Bradley. The route passed through Lomeshaye and therefore this suggests there was no mill at either Roughlee or Lomeshaye at this date. Evidence in the form of an invoice dated June 27th 1690 that the miller of Bradley had been paid 12/6 for ten pecks of dried oats purchased in December 1689 that Bradley had a kiln and was drying grain.
This is good evidence that there was no mill at Roughlee in 1533 because if there were, Roughlee wouldn't be within the multure of Bradley Mill.  Your 1673 reference shows that there was a mill at Roughlee and the reference for 1739 confirms this.  The question is when it was built, the answer; sometime between 1533 and 1673 and I would say definitely for corn milling.  If I had to guess I'd say c.1570/80.  There seems to have been a lot of mill-building then all over the north, most likely as a direct result of rising demand due to population growth.  What happened next was the late 18th century rush to convert any water power source into a textile mill using the newly invented machines.  This was exactly what Hargreaves was doing at Barrowford.  So I don't think you need to get hung up on more than one mill on the site.  The attraction of these sites was the existing infrastructure used to drive the corn mill.  These early entrepreneurs looked for the cheapest and most efficient conversion, they simply ripped out the corn milling machinery and converted to spinning.  In some cases they seem to have kept the corn-grinding machinery for a second string but these are rare.  Most of the conversions were total. 
So, start with the assumption that Roughlee Mill was built c.1570/80, functioned as a corn mill until the middle of the 18th century, gradually shifting over from flour to animal feeds as the more efficient town mills and better transport made them unprofitable.  Quite possibly a period of disuse and then at the end of the 18th C a rebirth as a textile mill.  By the 1830s these mills, if they had survived the change over to textiles, were coming under pressure from the town mills and the advent of steam.  Most of them were out of business by 1850/60.
Hope that helps with the overall picture.  If you want expansion on any of the points just ask.