THE ISLE OF HONEY
IF we are to accept all that the old Roman historians have put on record
to the glory of their race, we must believe that their conquering legions
found everywhere barbarism, and left in its place the seeds of a high
civilisation—high, at least, in the general acceptance of the word in
those lurid, moving days.
But it may well be questioned whether the Britain that Cæsar first knew
was as barbaric as it has been painted. We are accustomed to look upon
Cæsar’s account of his earliest view of Albion—of Eilanban, the White
Island, as the Britons themselves called it—as the first glance
vouchsafed to us into the history of our own land. But this is very far
from being the truth. British history begins with the record of the
first voyage of the Phoenicians, who, adventuring farther than any other
of their intrepid race, chanced upon the Scilly Isles and the
neighbouring coast of Cornwall, and thence brought back their first cargo
of tin.
And how long ago this is who shall say? The whereabouts of the
Phoenician Barat-Anac, the Country of Tin, remained a secret probably for
ages, jealously guarded by these ancient mariners, the first true seamen
that the world had ever known. They were expert navigators, venturing
enormous distances oversea, even in King Solomon’s time; and that was a
thousand years before the advent of Cæsar. In all likelihood they had
been in frequent communication with the Britons centuries before the
Greeks took to searching for this wonderful tin-bearing land, and still
longer before the name Barat-Anac became corrupted into the Britannia of
the Romans. And it is hardly to be supposed that a people of so ancient
a civilisation, and of so great a repute in the sciences and refinements
of life, as the Phoenicians—a people from whom the early Greeks
themselves had learned the art and practice of letters—could remain in
touch, century after century, with a nation like the Britons without
affecting in them enormous improvement and development in every way that
would appeal to so high-mettled and competent a race.
For high-mettled and capable the Britons were even in those old, dim,
far-off days. Cæsar’s account of them, read between the lines, accords
ill with the commonly accepted notion of a horde of savages, pigging
together in reed hovels, and daubing their naked bodies blue to strike
terror into the equally savage minds of their island adversaries. We get
a glimpse of a people much farther advanced in the arts of peace and war.
In all probability they clothed themselves at ordinary times,
picturesquely enough, in the furs of the wild animals, with which the
island abounded; and it was only in war-time that they stripped and
painted. Old prints have familiarised us with the sight of the sailors
of Drake and Nelson stripped much in the same way; and the blue paint of
Druidical times is not divided by so great a gulf as the ages warrant
from the scarlet cloth and glittering brass-ware of nineteenth-century
fighting-men. As armourers the ancient Britons must have been not
immeasurably inferior to the Romans, and we are told that they excelled
in at least one difficult craft, the making of all sorts of basket-ware.
But there is other testimony, apart from Cæsar’s, in favour of the view
that they were by no means a barbarous people. Diodorus Siculus, who was
Cæsar’s contemporary, speaks of them as possessing an integrity of
character even superior to that commonly obtaining among the Romans; and
Tacitus, writing about a century later, ascribes to them great alertness
of apprehension, as well as high mental capacity. Protected as they were
by the sea, it is probable that war entered to no large extent into their
lives, and they were essentially a pastoral people. The cultured and
daring Phoenician traders are certain to have prospected the coast much
farther eastward than is recorded, and thus to have materially hastened
British advance in civilisation—at least, as far as the southern tribes
were concerned.
It has been claimed—on what evidence it is difficult to determine—that
the Romans, besides teaching the Britons all other arts of manufacture
and husbandry, introduced the practice of bee-culture into the conquered
isles. But Pliny, giving an account of the voyages of Pytheas, which are
supposed to have been undertaken some three hundred years before Cæsar
ever set foot here, mentions the Geographer of Marseilles as landing in
Britain, and finding the people brewing a drink from wheat and honey.
There is, however, another source of testimony on this point, of
infinitely greater antiquity than any yet enumerated. Long before the
Phoenician sailors discovered their tin-country, there were bards in
Eilenban—the White Island—hymning the prowess of their Celtic heroes and
the traditional doings of their race. These old wild songs were handed
down from singer to singer through the ages, and many of them, still
extant among the records of the Welsh bards, must be of unfathomable
antiquity. These profess to describe the state of Britain from the very
earliest beginnings of the human race. And in some of them, which are
seemingly among the oldest, Britain is called the Isle of Honey, because
of the abundance of wild bees everywhere in the primæval woods. There
would be little profit, and no little folly, in seeking to invest these
old traditions with any more than their due significance. But there is
much in a name. And it may be conjectured that if Britain was known
among the early Druidical bards as the Isle of Honey the natural
conditions giving rise to the name were still prevalent, and reflected
immemorially in the life of the people, when Cæsar first saw them
crowding the white cliffs above him, a huge-limbed, ruddy-locked,
war-like race. He records that they possessed their herds of tame cattle
and their cultivated fields; and it is reasonable to suppose that the
hives of wattled osier that Virgil wrote of a century later had their
ancient counterpart of woven basket hives in the British villages of the
day.
No doubt the Romans, during their second and permanent occupation, which
did not take place until a hundred years after, taught the Britons their
own methods of bee-management, and improved in numberless ways on the
practice of the craft, which, among the British, was probably a very
simple and rough-and-ready affair. But it was not until the Romans had
gone, and the Anglo-Saxon rule was fairly established in the Island, that
bee-keeping seems to have become one of the recognised national
industries. The records bearing on the social life of the people at that
time are necessarily broken and scanty; but it is certain that honey,
with its products, had become an important article of diet among all
classes, high and low. It is difficult—here in the present time, when
cane and beet-sugar, and even chemical sweetening agents, are in constant
and universal use—to realise that, from the remotest times down to the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, there was practically no other
sweet-food of any description, except honey, in the world; and to
estimate, therefore, what a prominent place in the industries of each
country bee-keeping must then have occupied. There was nothing else but
honey for all purposes, and it is constantly mentioned in the old monkish
chronicles and the curious manuscript cookery-books that have survived
from the Middle Ages.
It is true that the sugar-cane was known as far back as the first century
A.D. Strabo, writing just before the commencement of the Christian Era,
relates how Nearchus, who was Admiral of the Fleet to Alexander the
Great, made an important voyage of discovery in the Indian Ocean, and
brought back news of the wonderful “honey-bearing reed,” which he found
in use among the natives of India. There is a record that the Spaniards
brought the sugar-cane from the East, and planted it in Madeira early in
the fifteenth century. Thence its cultivation spread to the West Indies
and South America, during that and the following century. Throughout the
Middle Ages it was in very restricted use among the richest and noblest
families in Europe, Venice being then the centre of its distribution.
But cane-sugar was little else than a costly luxury of diet, or a vehicle
in medicine, even among the highest in the land, until well into the
seventeenth century, when it slowly began to oust honey from the popular
favour. The chances are, however, that the middle and lower classes of
England possessed, and could afford, no other sweetening agent but honey,
for any purpose, down to about three hundred years ago.
Among the Anglo-Saxons the beehives supplied the whole nation, from the
King down to the poorest serf, not only with an important part of their
food, but with drink and light as well. We read of mead being served at
all the royal banquets, and in common use in every monastery. Even in
those far-off days there were wayside taverns where drink was retailed;
and the chief potion was mead, although a kind of ale was also brewed.
No priest was allowed to enter these hostelries, but this could scarcely
have been a great deprivation, as the home allowance of mead was a
sufficiently generous one. Ethelwold’s allowance to each half-dozen of
his monks at dinner was a sextarium of mead, which, in modern measure,
would be probably several gallons.
There were three kinds of liquor brewed from honey in Anglo-Saxon times.
The commonest, or mead proper, which may be taken as the usual drink of
the masses, was made by steeping in water the crushed refuse of the combs
after the honey had been pressed from them. This would be strained and
set aside in earthen vessels until it fermented and became mead. And the
longer it was kept, the more potent grew the liquor. Another kind, made
from honey, water, and the juice of mulberries, was called Morat; and
this, presumably, was the beverage of the more well-to-do. A third
concoction, known as Pigment, was brewed from the purest honey, flavoured
with spices of different sorts, and received an additional lacing of some
kind of wine. Probably this was the mead served at the royal table. The
office of King’s Cup-bearer could have been no sinecure in those days,
for it was the custom of Anglo-Saxon monarchs to entertain their
courtiers at four banquets daily, and the quantities of liquor which the
old records tell us were consumed on these occasions seem incredible,
even in the annals of such a deep-drinking race. Not the least valuable
outcome of the Norman Conquest, as far as the national temperance was
concerned, must have been the reform instituted in these Court orgies by
William the First, who reduced their number to a single state banquet
daily.
If it may be supposed that the reign of Harold marked the summit of
popularity for our good old English honey-brew, it is equally certain
that with the coming of the Normans began its slow decline in the
national estimation. Following in the trail of Duke William’s
nondescript army came the traders, with their outlandish liquors from the
grape; and wine must soon have taken the place of the Saxon mead, first
among the foreign nobles, and later among the native thanes. From that
day mead has steadily declined in vogue, and to-day mead-making is
practically a lost art, surviving only among a few old-fashioned folk
here and there in remote country places.
But it is still to be obtained; and those of us who have had the good
fortune to taste good old mead, well matured in the wood, are sure to
feel a regret that no determined effort is being made to rehabilitate it
in the national favour. Perhaps there is no more wholesome drink in the
world, and certainly none requiring less technical skill in the making.
All the ancient books on bee-keeping give receipts for its manufacture,
differing only in the variety of foreign ingredients added for its
improvement, or, as we prefer to believe, to its degradation. For the
finest mead can be brewed from pure honey and water alone, and any
addition of spices or other matter serves only to destroy its unique
flavour. Some of the sixteenth and seventeenth century bee-masters were
renowned in their day for their mead-brewing; and one of the foremost of
them claims for his potion that it was absolutely indistinguishable, by
the most competent judges, from old Canary Sack. He gives careful
directions for the manufacture of his mead; and these can be, and have,
indeed, recently been, followed with complete success. This mead, when
kept for a number of years, froths into the glass like champagne, but
stills at once, leaving the glass lined with sparkling air-bells. It is
of a pale golden colour, and has a bouquet something like old cider; but
its flavour is hardly to be compared with any known liquor of the present
time. It is interesting, however, to have its originator’s authority for
its close resemblance to Canary Sack, as this gives a clue to the
intrinsic qualities of a wine long since passed out of the popular ken.