There is a long history of
water-mills being operated in the Wye Valley which drops about in its course. The
Domesday Book records eighteen of them in the nine miles between
West Wycombe and the
Thames. By the seventeenth century there were
fulling mills as well as
corn mills. A Court of Survey in 1627 lists six mills running upstream from the boundary with Wooburn Parish: the paper mill, Tredway, Loudwater, Bassetsbury, Chalfonts (Rye) and Bridge. There were by this time at least two
paper mills: Glory in
Wooburn Green and Hedge in
Loudwater. By 1636 another paper mill had been established in the parish of West Wycombe and by 1656 another at Marsh, below
Wycombe. At this time paper was made from rags and by the end of the eighteenth century more than 150 men were recorded as papermakers in the valley. In 1816 there were 32 paper mills (some of which also milled corn), four which only milled corn and one which was also a saw mill. This was when paper making reached its peak in the valley. However, the introduction of the
Fourdrinier machine at the nearby
Frogmore Paper Mill, which produced a continuous roll of paper, led to widespread unemployment and many families went to the cotton mills of
Lancashire. In 1830 there were riots when machine wreckers broke the machines at Ash, Marsh Green and Loudwater. Twenty men were punished by
penal transportation to
Tasmania. Papermaking continued at the Soho and Glory mills till the end of the twentieth century, though the water-mills gave way to steam in the mid-nineteenth century. The Soho mill in Wooburn was the prime supplier of high-grade colour paper till its demise in 1984. ==Mills==