Enjoying as we do the advantages of the extension of scientific knowledge, and its application to our routine of daily wants, we are apt to forget that our forefathers were without many things we deem essentials. Your correspondents C. W. G. and B. B. have touched upon a curious feature of antiquity, which science and commerce have rendered obsolete. Yet, before the introduction of sugar, bees were important ministers to the luxuries of the great, as mentioned at the above-cited pages. I was struck with the following passage in the first forest charter of King Henry III.: "Every freeman ... shall likewise have the honey which shall be found in his woods." This, in a charter second only in importance, perhaps, to Magna Charta itself, sounds strange to our ideas; moderns would not think it a very royal boon. But the note with which Mr. R. Thomson (_Historical Essay on the Magna Charta of King John_, p. 352.) illustrates this passage is interesting, and, though rather long, may be worth insertion in your columns: "The second part of this chapter secures to the woodland proprietor all the honey found in his woods; which was certainly a much more important gift than it would at first appear, since the Hon. Daines Barrington remarks, that perhaps there has been no lawsuit or question concerning it for the last three hundred years. In the middle ages, however, the use of honey was very extensive in England, as sugar was not brought hither until the fifteenth century; and it was not only a general substitute for it in preserving, but many of the more luxurious beverages were principally composed of it, as mead, metheglin, pigment, and morat, and these were famous from the Saxon days, down even to the time of the present charter (1217). In the old Danish and Swedish laws bees form a principal subject; and honey was a considerable article of rent in Poland, in which it was a custom to bind any one who stole it to the tree whence it was taken. The Baron de Mayerberg also relates, that when he travelled in Muscovy in 1661, he saw trees there expressly adapted to receive bees, which even those who felled their own wood were enjoined to take down in such a manner that they who prepared them should have the benefit of the honey. Nor was the wax of less importance to the woodland proprietors of England, since candles of tallow are said to have been first used only in 1290, and those of wax were so great a luxury, that in some places they were unknown: but a statute concerning wax-chandlers, passed in 1433 (the 11th of Henry VI. chap. 12.), states that wax was then used in great quantities for the images of saints. Only referring, however, to the well-known use of large wax tapers by King Alfred in the close of the ninth century, it may be observed that in the laws of Hoel Dha, king of South Wales, which are acknowledged