The Roman emperor Augustus is said to have asked the Roman orator, poet, and politician, Publius Vedius Pollio, how to live a long life. Pollio answered that ‘applying the Muse water within, and anointing oil without the body’ would help to keep him free of sickness. Whether Augustus took up Pollio’s advice is not mentioned. Indeed, Thomas Hill was little interested in exploring the story further when he took it from Pliny the Elder’s The Natural History in the 1560s as part of his small treatise on beekeeping, A Pleasant Instruction of the Perfect ordering of Bees (London, 1568).
The story’s purpose, as an opening passage of his twenty-ninth chapter, was meant only to introduce Muses water (otherwise called Melicrate by the Greeks or more commonly, Hydromel), and to suggest that it is a drink containing various health benefits. Hill went on to explain that the Muses water can ‘ease the passage of wind or breath, soften the belly’ and cure poisoning by Henbane. He then gave a recipe;
Let eight times so much water be mixed unto your honey prepared which boil or seethe so long, until no more foam arises to be skimmed off, then taking it from the fire, preserve to your use.
Hill provides no more detail than that, but he does go on in the next chapter to give a recipe for Oenomel – ‘a sweet wine made with honey’ – that he says is ‘not only for the preservation of health but also to expel the torment of sickness’. Hill advises his readers that the best Oenomel is made of ‘old and tart wine’ with ‘the best purified honey’. His recipe;
Take one gallon and a quart of wine and mix it with half a gallon and a pint of the best honey.
There are more recipes in Hill’s treatise on beekeeping. There are several that describes a distillation of the honey, and another that describes the making of a Honey Quintessence.
Hill’s manual was the first handbook published in English about beekeeping, and it was attached to the very first handbook on gardening (The Profitable Art of Gardening), also produced by Hill. The purpose was a simple one: to bring the knowledge of ancient authorities such as Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, and Virgil, to a modern audience as a means of providing ‘their knowledge and experience’ for the profit of ‘poor husbandmen’ and the better wealth of England more generally.
It seems likely that the recipes for Hydromel and Oenomel were common knowledge and all Hill did here was to cite an authority for something that was already known (he cited Paul Aegina – a 7th-century Greek physician – and Pedanius Dioscorides – a 1st-century Greek physician and botanist). The recipes for distillation and Quintessence were more advanced and might well have been one of the earliest published recipes for these drinks in the English language (although again, the general principles were likely well known).*
By including recipes in his book, Hill emphasises the benefits of beekeeping for his readers but also makes the manual useful beyond those strictly interested in managing a swarm of bees. Landowners or their land managers, who purchased the book to improve the gardens, might equally pass the knowledge of honey recipes to others in gentry households. It would be fascinating to discover if any manuscript recipe books from this period contained references to Hill’s honeyed-drinks or whether any copy of Hill’s books contains annotations or bookmarks related to the recipes.
At the very least, by initialising the genre of beekeeping manuals in England, Hill provided precedence in terms of the structure of content, if not in detail. Many of the beekeeping manuals published in the seventeenth-century also contained recipes for honeyed-drinks and many followed a similar structure to the one that Hill provided, even where they disagreed with many of his claims. How many people followed the recipes, however, is another question entirely.
* Quintessence was described by Andreas Vesalius in 1551 in a book called A compendious declaration of the excellent virtues of a certain lately invented oil, called for the worthiness thereof oil imperial. He described the Quintessence as ‘nothing else but aqua vitae’ (i.e. distilled wine), and does not mention honey. In 1559, Konrad Gesner’s The Treasure of Euonymus included a much more detailed description of types of Quintessence as drawn out of wine made from a variety of wood, fruits, flowers, oats, leaves, seeds, stones, metals, flesh, and spices. There is a brief mention of honey quintessence, but not a specific recipe for it. I have yet to find any other English printed work before 1568 that describes Honey Quintessence in any kind of detail.
Matthew Phillpott lives in the United Kingdom and undertook studies in early modern history at Hull and Sheffield. He now works at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, and in addition investigates early modern printed materials for ideas about knowledge, history, culture, health, and food. He has recently started a new website to talk more about his research into bee culture in the early modern period called Early Modern Bees.
