Well, if Chaucer is anything to go by, millers were shits. Wouldn’t put anything past them. Especially getting carpenters in trouble 
This is my main point, saws were a specialty item not used as commonly as we would think now. One reason is that iron is not a great material for making saws. Cast iron would have brittle teeth that easily break, and even wrought iron would have that problem because the grain would be oriented in the wrong direction allowing the teeth to break. Most of the saws that were in use would have been heavy items. Wrought iron is much more suitable for adzes, fros, scrapers, and other simpler cutting tools which were used for the majority of wood forming until steel became plentiful.
I gave my cite above, maybe it’s not even reflecting the actual situation, but what I know about is the evolution of carpentry tools and woodworking techniques, and I think saws would not have been that commonly used in an age when plenty of labor was available to use simpler and less expensive tools.
Getting off the side theme, this is why I think this would only be a small time scam. Bakers don’t get up in the middle of the night to fire their ovens only to sell an adulterated product which might get them killed if the local populace finds out.
If a baker can get sawdust cheaper than flour, there’s an obvious financial motive for replacing some of the flour with sawdust. A miller would have the same motivation. You wouldn’t want to replace enough of the flour with sawdust that people would be likely to notice it, of course.
People in the same time period went to the trouble of clipping coins, which would also carry a risk of being caught and killed, sometimes in nasty ways. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle mentions coin clipping in England in 1150. You’re probably not going to get a lot of profit each time you clip a coin, either, but if you keep doing it it adds up.
Complaints of the lack of fiber in their diet, then about sawdust in their bread. There’s no satisfying some people.
If a baker or a miller could increase profit even a few percent by mixing an undetectable amount of sawdust with the flour, that is a pretty strong incentive to adulterate the product. Over the course of years, the additional few percent of profit adds up to a considerable amount. As a one time scam, no it probably isn’t worth it. As a long term scam? Absolutely.
This does not explain why one guy had several.
I think you keep saying “saws” when you mean “two-man pit saws”
There are things you can do with saws that you can’t do as easily with other tools, or guys wouldn’t have several of them.
I feel like I’m repeating myself here. You’re saying they were rare, and I’m pointing out that one guy on Gotland (hardly the centre of Europe) had 3…
Clearly, he was a saw fetishist.
I think you can both be right. I certainly seems to me that while saws existed and weren’t startlingly rare, lots of finish work that today we’d do with saws was instead done with an adze or plane or draw knife.
Anyway, at least sawdust isn’t actively toxic.
Correct, and I don’t see the need to belabor the point. I just wanted to point out that sawdust wouldn’t have been as readily available as today which some people may not realize. I’m not at all claiming it was non-existent.
It might also be the kind of thing a miller or baker might try during a famine or a siege. People have eaten all sorts of things otherwise considered inedible during times like that.
Actually there are possibilities to substitute parts of the flour for tree bark “flour”.
Here you can read up on Bark Bread: Bark bread - Wikipedia
Here is a recipe for a bark bread
Cinnamonis also a bark
Also, when you look at the ingredients list of your favorite breakfast cereal, burger, weight watcher ice-cream, etc and it contains the ingredient “cellulose” it, it may be a derivative of wood pulp. Cite
…our daily bread give us today…with wood
Is there a famine going on in the US & EU today?
Good old German Ersatz bread contained saw dust.
I know that the narrator of the BBC’s World at War miniseries (Lawrence Olivier) states that this was done in Russia during the Germans siege of Leningrad. Wiki confirms this. Obviously ‘costumer concern’ was not an issue in this case.
Also Latin scobis, Ancient Greek prísma sawdust, xylopristikós relative to wood sawdust.
I remember this. Fiber started to become a “thing” in food in the 70s. So some companies added sawdust-y stuff to their high-fiber breads. We tried out a loaf of Roman Meal or whatever. It literally tasted like sawdust. ??? So we checked the label: “cellulose from wood fiber” or some such. Eccch.
Yeah, you can add sawdust to bread, but any significant amount can be tasted.
I actually really like Roman Meal bread, but I actually haven’t been able to find a store that carries it locally. Assuming it still exists.
Also, considering bread at the various times mentioned had a high probability of containing weevils in various states of growth and or dismemberment, or if it had rye might contain ergot, sawdust seems completely benign.
Have you ever eaten low fat bread? Was it instantly apparent to you? They lower the calories in light breads by adding wood cellulose as an ingredient. I’ve had it, it still tastes like bread more or less.
Go to any supermarket and check out the ingredients of “high fiber” bread. I bet you will find cellulose, aka sawdust. It doesn’t change the flavor or texture of the bread very much. Well, if you add a whole lot I suppose it would, but there are some fairly hefty additions of “cellulose” on the market today, and while the bread isn’t great, it tastes fine.
One of our dogs had a bout of colitis and was on a high fiber prescription diet for a few weeks. The fiber source was ground peanut hulls. The dog loved the taste!