The Price of Honey

At this time of year, on the darkening cusp of autumn,  beekeepers tend to ponder what they have achieved during the year, totting up the benefits that nature has so generously provided and wondering what they’ll be able to get for them.

Pricing is a a thorny issue.  No beekeeper wants to think of themselves quite as mercenary as the next, but neither do they want to undercut their neighbours. We all want to charge a fair price. And that, or so we’ve been told by the captains of the retail economy, is whatever the market will bear.

There are, however, markets and markets and it’s difficult to work out what a fair price is. At the bottom end are the ‘farm gate’ sales, direct to individuals who may well know the state of your kitchen, artisanship and expertise, and who won’t be deceived by a fancy label suggestive of rustic industry.  At the top are the Sunday markets, where the well-heeled happily totter from stall to stall, spraying cash like dogs at lampposts , lavishly rewarding anyone with the gall to wear a smock.

And thus a pound of London honey, locally fetched and harvested, can be had in this fair metropolis, for anywhere between £4 and £30, depending on what size the jars are and where it’s being sold.

That’s a wide range for what is, in essence, all the same stuff, and probably unrivalled in terms of commodities.  You might find similar variance in the suburban staples of wine and cheese, but with those there’s usually some difference in taste, as well as provenance, that might conceivably justify the range. For honey, however, there is no obvious relationship between the product and its price.

Perhaps, I thought, that’s always been the case. So I went looking.

Sadly, nobody seems to have kept much of a record of honey prices in London. The surviving ledgers of grand households rarely list honey in their grocery books, presumably because they kept their own bees, and advertisements rarely list the prices of commodities.  I wondered if Kimpton’s, the venerable honey trading company whose Managing Director used to give us entertaining talks, could help. But sadly, they are no more. Unlike the Old Bailey, which does have records online [1].

Between 1689 and 1847 there were 21 cases involving the theft of honey for which both quantity and value are listed. The largest haul was acquired by Robert Wheelhouse in 1818, who managed, with some assistance, to stagger off with 53 lbs of honey (plus 250 lbs of butter, 26 hams and four casks) from a grocer’s in Prescot Street. In those days 53 lbs of honey was worth £2, or about ninepence a pound, equivalent (in cost-of-living terms*) to around £2.20 per pound in today’s money. It was an audaciously convenient raid from his house in the next street, but though he seems to have taken advantage of the short, dark alley that now separates the Royal College of Physicians from a curry house, it wasn’t dark or short enough.

Better prices could be had, it seems. John Arnold, in 1830 stole a hive  from a Henry Catling. The hive was valued at 15s (which was very steep for the time) and 10lb of honey in it at 15s also. That’s about £ 5.83 per pound in today’s money, and double the average for the time.

The price of the hive will have been higher than usual on account of it having the bees in it. When Richard Norris was done, in 1807, for filching a couple of hives from Joseph Weedon,  the victim told the court “we sell them at a shilling a pound, the bees and hives altogether”.  In that case, the court valued the hives at £3 the pair, nearly £100 each in today’s money.

Without the bees, even fancy hives weren’t worth much, as John Brockbank found when he had two hives stolen from Enfield. “One of the hives”, he told the court, “was made of a China tea-chest, with glass doors of our own putting in, that we might see them at work”. Despite that added value, they were given at 4s the pair (£12.48 today). The other hive, however, was just a “common straw hive”, and those weren’t worth more than a shilling or two – £4 at most in today’s money.

In the case of Richard Morton, who I mentioned earlier, the two hives he stole in 1815 were worth 3 shillings the pair, which seems to be the average for the time. He also stole a saucer, which sheds a little light on the mechanics of the thievery. He claimed, on oath, that the saucer was used for feeding sugar to the bees, but the Bow-Street patrol, which had visited his garden, were sure the bees had been ‘stifled with brimstone’ and, indeed, found some brimstone on Morton’s person.  I don’t know what Morton was like, as a person, but the 10lb of honey in the hives were valued at a whole £1 (£5.89 per lb today), which makes it the most expensive honey to be stolen in the history of the Old Bailey.

If Morton had followed the example of Harrow’s Thomas Hedges, he might have done better. Hedges was accused of stuffing hives he’d stolen above his kitchen ceiling. When questioned, he said the bees had been destroyed by mice. Even though his victim, a John Fauch, said he could identify one hive by a chalk-line on it, the jury bought the mice story and Hedges went free.

Some thieves weren’t so brutal as to kill the bees or, at least, understood their value. John Arnold, when caught with the hives he’d stolen by a constable in Kilburn, had it wrapped in a sack with the bees alive within. Compassionate or otherwise, he still ended up, like Morton, sentenced to 7 years exile in Australia.

Carelessness was, sadly, common. When John Blythe and George Wilson  pinched two hives (value 4s) from John Skinner, and put them in Thomas Blythe’s garden, they failed to take a basic precaution. When Skinner pitched up with Officer Camp the following evening, he  found his hives in one of the two bee-houses, ten or twelve yards from the house, and instantly “knew them by the sticks I had put for them to swarm on”, which work got both Blythes and Wilson six months each in prison.

The big money back then wasn’t in bees or honey or even hives. It was in wax. In the shady days of the late eighteenth century, when it was possible for piratical outfits to blossom into monopolistic, exploitative, tax-dodging multinationals with fingers in every part of government, the East India Company was, among many other things, a large trader in beeswax. In 1791 one of their employees, a William Abbot, tried to develop a sideline, calculating that the Company wouldn’t miss any wax if it disappeared before it had been weighed and stamped. So he lowered a sack of wax from the garret of the warehouse to the ground, failing to realise that this might be noticed. Jethro Shipley noticed exactly that and, being a responsible employee, snitched to William Isles, a valiant clerk of the Company, who trotted up the stairs to the  attic, found Mr Abbot hiding on top of a beam and got him down by hitting his legs with a stick. The prisoner’s defence was that he thought the wax was cheese and, in any case, had been paid by a man in a smock to take it to Bishopsgate. Which tells us something of the mind of William Abbot, if nothing about men in smocks.

Happily for Abbott, the wholesale price of beeswax was fairly low, and the 114 lbs he’d tried to pinch was valued at only £10 (about  £112 today), a price that hadn’t been beaten in the Old Bailey since 1728, the average being nearer a shilling (about £10 today) a pound.  Abbott still got a public whipping, but that was presumably better than prison or transportation.

The price of beeswax  varied more than almost anything. William and George Field, merchants, who had just 8 lbs stolen in 1797, reckoned it was worth £6 – about £80 per pound in today’s money, suggesting the Fields weren’t strangers to the mark-up.  In 1728, in contrast, the 7 lbs of beeswax stolen by James Picket was only worth 10d (about 85p per lb today). Picket got transported for that but, as was the tradition at that time, only to America.

Fun though this digressing might be, it is all beside the point. My aim, after all, was to work out a fair price for things. So instead of gawping at criminality, I should be putting all this data together, working out the price per pound (or hive) and adjusting for changes in the cost of living. If I do that, I get this:

The median price is, more or less, what most of it sold for – the supermarket price if you like – and, at least for honey, that’s not far off the mark. The average price will always be higher than the median, same as average salaries are higher than what most people earn. That’s because the floor is zero, and the ceiling is limited only by the rapacity of mercantile imaginations.

Some will, no doubt, point out that there’s not much evidence to go on (67 cases in all) that they cover a span of over 150 years (1689 – 1847), and they weren’t, in any sense of the word, prices actually paid. But there’s not much I can do about historical bee-related crime (though plenty are trying to redress the balance now). And, perhaps surprisingly, the cost of living didn’t really change much in all that time. It went up a bit, now and again, but it sometimes went down a bit as well. Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California at Davis, has spent about a decade working through the economic history of the past seven centuries and, in a picture, this is what he finds [2]:

 However reasonable my calculations, it doesn’t really help reach much of a conclusing. All I’ve found is that there isn’t a fair price for anything, a conclusion that leaves me dissatisfied. But perhaps that’s just as well; it might, at least, soothe a few consciences.

* ‘Today’s’ prices are got by converting old prices (in pounds, shillings and old pence) to decimal and then dividing by the cost of living index from [2].

[1] http://www.oldbaileyonline.org

[2] Gregory Clark (2011) : Average Earnings and Retail Prices, UK, 1209-2010