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Beating is the most common and quickest way to do so.
More advanced technology for beating material for papermaking came with the introduction of stampers, which range from foot-powered adaptations of the mortar and pestle design to enormous mechanical devices, with stamper heads of different degrees of coarseness in adjacent troughs for processing the material in stages. In the European mills of the middle ages and Renaissance, papermakers constructed large, elaborate, water-powered stamping mills to process a considerable amount of cloth into pulp for papermaking, with ingenious features like rinse water running through the troughs where the fiber was being beaten, to remove waste materials throughout the process. In the late 17th century, the Dutch invented a mechanical device known as the Hollander beater. These are still used by hand papermakers today, although the machine-made paper industry has generally switched to more chemical ways of breaking down material for papermaking. The roll turns in close proximity to the bedplate and the material being beaten is forced between the blades, through the circular movement of the water.