The first reference to the windmill in…

The first reference to the windmill in Europe is made by a Dean Herbert of East Anglia, whose mills are supposedly in competition with the abbey of Bury St Edmunds.

This is probably an invention imported from interaction with the Muslim world, since the first windmills were most likely innovated from the Bana Musa brothers in the Islamic Middle East during the middle ninth century.

The windmill will spread in the other direction, to be introduced by as early as 1219 to China.