“Oh, we can make liquor to sweeten our lips
Of pumpkins, of parsnips, of walnut-tree chips.”
Sign-board of Amherst Hotel.
According to Diodorus Siculus, the ancient Britons drank on festive occasions liquors made from honey, apples, and barley, viz., mead, cider, and ale. The Celts drank mead and cider—natural drinks within the capabilities of manufacture by slightly civilized nations; for wild honey and wild apples could be found everywhere. Ale indicated agriculture and a more advanced civilization.
Mead, or metheglin, of fermented honey, herbs, and water, has been made by every race and tribe on this globe, living where there was enough vegetation to cherish bees. It had been a universal drink in England, but was somewhat in disuse when this country was settled.
Harrison wrote:—
“The Welsh make no less account of metheglin than the Greeks did of their ambrosia or nectar, which for the pleasantness thereof was supposed to be such as the gods themselves did delight in. There is a kind of swishswash made also in Essex, and divers other places, with honeycomb and water, which the homely country-wives putting some pepper and a little other spice among, called mead: very good in mine opinion for such as love to be loose-bodied at large, or a little eased of the cough. Otherwise it differeth so much from true metheglin as chalk from cheese; and one of the best things that I know belonging thereto is, that they spend but little labour and less cost in making of the same, and therefore no great loss if it were never occupied.”
Metheglin was one of the drinks of the American colonists. It was a favorite drink in Kentucky till well into this century. As early as 1633, the Piscataqua planters of New Hampshire, in their list of values which they set in furs,—the currency of the colony,—made “6 Gallon Mathaglin equal 2 Lb Beaver.” In Virginia, whole plantations of honey locust were set out to supply metheglin. The long beans of the locust were ground and mixed with honey herbs and water, and fermented.
In a letter written from Virginia in 1649, it is told of “an ancient planter of twenty-five years standing,” that he had good store of bees and “made excellent good Matheglin, a pleasant and strong drink.”
Oldmixon, in History of Carolina (1708), says, “the bees swarm there six or seven times a year, and the metheglin made there is as good as Malaga sack,” which may be taken cum grano salis.