CHAPTER II
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.