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.
CHAPTER III
BEE-MASTERS IN THE MIDDLE AGES
Students of old books on the honey-bee are generally struck with two very remarkable characteristics about them—their invariable fine old classic and romantic flavour, and their ingenious leavening of a great mass of quite obvious fable by a very small modicum of enduring fact.
It is difficult to realise, until one has delved deep into these curious old records, how completely they are dyed through and through with the picturesque, but mainly erroneous, ideas of the ancient classic bee-fathers. The writers were, almost without exception, earnest, practical men, whose chief interest in life was the study and pursuit of their craft. But they seem, one and all, to have laboured under the idea that it was their bounden duty to uphold everything written about bees by the old Greek and Roman litterati, and that it would be the rankest heresy to advance any new truth, garnered from their individual experience, unless it could be supported by ample testimony from the same infallible source.
They seemed to look upon the works of Aristotle, Virgil, Pliny, and the rest, as so many divine revelations of the mystery of bee-craft, all-sufficing, finitely perfect; and they continually quoted from them in support of their own contentions, or in refutation of the statements of others, much as teachers of religion refer doubters to Bible texts. The bee-masters of the Middle Ages were, however, not alone in adopting this peculiar attitude of mind. It seems to have been the prevailing habit of the time with all classes. One might almost be justified in concluding that the study of nature in those days had no other object with these inveterate old classicians but to support what had already been set down by their revered oracles. It was enough that a thing had been written in Greek or Latin in the literary youth of the world; it was immaculate—the first and last word on the question; and if their personal observations seemed at variance with any statement of the old-world writers, then the contradiction was only an apparent one, and could, no doubt, be easily resolved by a more learned exponent of these bee-scriptures of ancient days.
It is certainly, at first glance, a matter for wonder that men could pass their whole lives in the pursuit of the craft, and yet manage to preserve uncorrupted a faith which seems so readily, and at so many points, assailable. But it must be remembered that any observation of the inner life of the honey-bee was then an extremely difficult thing. It was next to impossible to see anything that was going on inside the hives in use at that day. Pliny mentions a hive made of what he calls mirror-stone, which was probably talc, and through the transparent sides of which the working of the bees could be seen. But nothing of the kind seems to have been attempted among English bee-masters until the seventeenth century. Moreover, even if the whole hive had been made of clear glass, the observer would have been very little the wiser. He would have had the outer sides of the two end combs in view, and he would have seen much coming and going among the bees, with an occasional glimpse of the queen. But all the wonderful activity of the hive, so laboriously ascertained by latter-day observers, with the help of so many ingenious appliances, goes on entirely in the hidden recesses of the combs; and any attempt to study this life under the conditions appertaining in the Middle Ages would have been manifestly futile. It was not until Huber’s leaf-hive was invented—when it became to some extent possible to divide the combs for a short time without hopelessly disturbing the bees—that any real progress in bee-knowledge was made. The modern observation-hive, wherein the bees are compelled to build their combs between glass partitions, one over the other instead of side by side, was a still greater advance, and rendered the whole interior of the bee-dwelling available for study. But it is open to objection that bee-life in such a contrivance is carried on under too artificial conditions. In a natural bee-nest, the combs are built roughly side by side, and the brood is reared in the centre area of each comb, the surface covered by the breeding-cells diminishing outwards in each direction. Thus the brood-nest takes a globular form, with the honey-stores above and around it; and this natural arrangement is inevitably destroyed in a hive where the combs are superimposed and not collateral.
In the face, therefore, of the practical impossibility of learning anything about bees when they were housed in the usual straw-skep, the old bee-masters confined themselves to a repetition of the beliefs of the ancient writers, deftly interwoven with speculations of their own, which, as no one was in a position to refute them, were advanced with all the more daring and assurance.