Many of our proverbs are derived from milling.  For instance, itinerant craftsmen would travel round re-dressing worn millstones, which was done using a steel tool called a bill, fragments of which would fly off and become embedded in the user’s wrist. To see how experienced he was the miller would ask him to show him his metal; hence the remark of someone who performs badly: “He’s not worth his metal.”

Flour was originally sifted in a sieve or tense– a boring and arduous task delegated to the miller’s boy. Hence the expression of a lazy boy “He won’t set the tense on fire!”, although as people forgot the tense they thought they had heard it as “Thames” or even “tents”. “Milling around”, “Wait your turn” and “”Run of the Mill” are other expressions whose origins we tend to overlook.

“Fair to middling” comes from the grading of flour into white flour, middlings and bran whilst, as grain for milling was known as grist, “It’s all grist to the mill” means that, whatever the grain, it all gets ground – and it’s all a way of making more profit.

A more obscure one that Rudyard Kipling uses is ”There was always one of ‘em that could see further into a millstone than most” (Puck of Pook’s Hill).  Perhaps "millstone" was originally "millpond".

The miller, unlike most villagers, did not need to labour in the fields and was envied and widely thought to be dishonest. This was also due to his payment traditionally being byway of a toll of what he ground.  As he was the one who weighed both the grain coming in and the resulting flour, it would not have been difficult for him to increase his share.  “A miller’s thumb is golden” refers not only to the miller’s skill in judging that the flour from the stones is just right by testing it between thumb and forefinger. Chaucer’s miller was bawdy,fat, drunk and stupid. There the reference to his “thumb of gold” is to his dishonesty.  Incidentally, you could tell a miller by his flattened thumb.

Do you know of any proverbs which can be traced to milling?