Dear Old E Folk Roy and I have been having a small correspondence on mead and the payment of rents in kind. I extended it slightly to the Easter or small tithes. We were wondering what was the experience and knowledge of the 'team' on this subject - not just mead but all other originally non-communted rents and tithes. Realising that even the great tithes must eventually have been commuted into cash, this way of paying rent must have become unwieldy at a fairly early date. Off the top of my head, I think that I remember part of a rent being paid in hens and certainly part of the small tithes for our parish was in hens' eggs as well as every seventh hive. This, I believe, must have been commuted in some way or another, perhaps more in the production of the hives rather than the hive itself. How the vicar ever acquired any honey from this parish, goodness only knows. I can't remember any hives in 50 years of probate inventories 1650-1700. Honey can't have figured too highly in this poor hilly! parish. Below is an extract of what I wrote to Roy a few days or so ago. "As far as the existence of honey and the production of mead is concerned - I'm not at all sure about the spread of production of this lovely drink. Wasn't it confined to monastic production? If so, this may have been an attempt by the former landlords of our ancient parish (whose abbey and convent was in Wales) to trawl their possessions in order to find sufficient raw material. After all, in a hilly country of comparatively poor tenants, how many would have had one hive, let alone seven? In all my reading of the local probate inventories, I have only come across the odd one. I do believe there were more pigs (swine) than bee hives and these were only in the possession of the more wealthy with them only having one apiece, except for the richest who had two. As I say, perhaps mead was a luxury product." Apologies for any overlap of argument or wordings. Now it's over to you Old English. Audrey