No doubt the Romans, during their second and permanent occupation, which did not take place until a hundred years after, taught the Britons their own methods of bee-management, and improved in numberless ways on the practice of the craft, which, among the British, was probably a very simple and rough-and-ready affair. But it was not until the Romans had gone, and the Anglo-Saxon rule was fairly established in the Island, that bee-keeping seems to have become one of the recognised national industries. The records bearing on the social life of the people at that time are necessarily broken and scanty; but it is certain that honey, with its products, had become an important article of diet among all classes, high and low. It is difficult—here in the present time, when cane and beet-sugar, and even chemical sweetening agents, are in constant and universal use—to realise that, from the remotest times down to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, there was practically no other sweet-food of any description, except honey, in the world; and to estimate, therefore, what a prominent place in the industries of each country bee-keeping must then have occupied. There was nothing else but honey for all purposes, and it is constantly mentioned in the old monkish chronicles and the curious manuscript cookery-books that have survived from the Middle Ages. It is true that the sugar-cane was known as far back as the first century A.D. Strabo, writing just before the commencement of the Christian Era, relates how Nearchus, who was Admiral of the Fleet to Alexander the Great, made an important voyage of discovery in the Indian Ocean, and brought back news of the wonderful “honey-bearing reed,” which he found in use among the natives of India. There is a record that the Spaniards brought the sugar-cane from the East, and planted it in Madeira early in the fifteenth century. Thence its cultivation spread to the West Indies and South America, during that and the following century. Throughout the Middle Ages it was in very restricted use among the richest and noblest families in Europe, Venice being then the centre of its distribution. But cane-sugar was little else than a costly luxury of diet, or a vehicle in medicine, even among the highest in the land, until well into the seventeenth century, when it slowly began to oust honey from the popular favour. The chances are, however, that the middle and lower classes of England possessed, and could afford, no other sweetening agent but honey, for any purpose, down to about three hundred years ago.