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.