Did Thomas Hill plagiarise the first beekeeping manual printed in English?
Part 06 in a semi-regular series of essays examining the 1568, A Profitable Instruction of the perfect ordering of Bees, written by Thomas Hill.
In 1609, Charles Butler accused Thomas Hill of plagiarism, claiming that his 1568 handbook A Profitable Instruction of the Perfect Ordering of Bees, was actually the uncredited work of a German physician, Georg Pictorius. Butler never used the word plagiarism (for that word lacked meaning in 1609) but his accusation is clear. According to Butler, Hill had faked his authorship of the very first English handbook about beekeeping.
The attack occurred in the opening pages of Butler’s beekeeping manual, The Feminine Monarchie. Here he sought to argue that very little had been written about honeybees which improves on what the ancient writers had stated. This, he felt, was a problem for the ancients had only ‘scattered’ knowledge, and more recent writers had only perpetuated a variety of untruths or misinterpretations. He did, however, admit that one of his predecessors was better than the rest, and that was Georg Pictorius.
Butler announced his admiration for Pictorius’ Pantopolion (published in 1563), claiming that he had taken more pains than most in preserving the writings of the ancient authors and remoulding them into ‘his method’. It was with great sadness and annoyance then, that:
“one T.H. [Thomas Hill] of London translating word for word into English as well as he could, concealing the authors name, adventured to publish in his own name.” (Butler, 1609, 3).
That, at least, is the claim. It is a claim that has been unquestioningly accepted by modern historians. For instance, Adam Ebert (2011), Jonathan Woolfson (2009), Eva Crane (1999), and Frederick R. Prete (1991) have all repeated the claim. Is it true though?
What did Thomas Hill claim?
The most obvious place to begin such an investigation is with the primary piece of evidence: Thomas Hill’s 1568 A Most Profitable Instruction of the Perfect Ordering of Bees. It is here where claims of authorship should be clearly stated. Indeed, on the title page, Hill admits that the work is ‘Englished’ by him, not authored. This is important. Hill and other writers in the sixteenth century used the word ‘Englished’ to mean translated. However, unlike his The Contemplation of Mankind where he clearly stated Melampus as a minor text that he has translated in full, here he leaves the form of translation vague.
In the preface to his bee manual, Hill is keen to stress that he has not given any labour of his own to the work, but he nonetheless leaves the impression that he undertook the task of gathering various accounts, translating them, and binding them together. Directly after he claimed that the work wasn’t his he stated ‘[I] rather have collected the sayings and writings of many ancient authors’. He also states that it required long study on his part and that it was no easy task to reduce the works of ‘divers ancient writers’ into one small treatise.
From the evidence in the frontispiece and preface Charles Butler certainly appears to have a case when he accused Hill of plagiarism. Georg Pictorius is not mentioned once in the main body of the text either, despite Hill listing his sources and referring to them throughout the chapters. Rather than mention that the text was translated from Pictorius he refers only to the original sources.
On the surface, this would seem damning. However, it is not quite as simple as it would seem. In the sixteenth century citation etiquette was very different than it is now. This is a complex subject, but essentially it was generally believed that the original source of information or words was the important element to cite, not whether the material came from an intermediary source. In other words, it was what Aristotle stated that mattered, not the fact that the information came to Hill via Pictorius’ more recent text.
I wrote a bit about this subject in a book that I published back in 2018 called The Reformation of England’s Past. This piece of research has nothing to do with Honeybee Histories but was instead a study of the most important publication during the reign of Elizabeth I, The Acts and Monuments, compiled by John Foxe. The Acts and Monuments (more popularly recorded as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs) reinterpreted the past from one which focused on a Roman Catholic worldview, to one focused and suitable to a newly secured Protestant nation.
In this book, I examined the sources which Foxe used to construct that history. This wasn’t always easy because the original source was often the one that Foxe cited rather than the actual text that he probably used, which was often a later medieval or sixteenth-century work. As part of my analysis, I wrote that:
“a copy of a text, whether in manuscript or printed form, was understood as little more than a conveyer of knowledge and that it was this that was of paramount importance. It is the first author, the originator of the knowledge who is generally cited. It is they who provide the stamp of authority, the claim of truth.” (Phillpott, 2018, 33).
The fact then, that Thomas Hill seems to conceal the authorship of the intermediary author (in this case Georg Pictorius) is not necessarily as damning as it first seems. Whilst there is some dishonesty in doing so (certainly in the way that he presents the facts in his preface), Hill is nonetheless following the etiquette and scholarly expectations of his time. In essence, Hill, like Foxe, often acts as more a compiler of information than an author. This becomes more obvious when we realise that Hill’s beekeeping manual is not entirely taken from the Pantopolion in the first place. His beekeeping manual is not just a translation of a German book, but an expansion, based on a variety of other sources.
Comparison to the Pantopolion
The Pantopolion by Georg Pictorius was published in 1563 and contained three different treatises. The first focuses on various animals, plants, and metals. The second promises a focus on Bees, Wax, and Honey, and the third discusses demons, astrology, prophecies, and miracles. Thomas Hill translated the second of these nearly word-for-word, even keeping most of the chapter titles the same.
I have compared these texts in detail and found that the entirety of Pictorius’ treatise on Bees, wax, and honey, is, indeed, translated and contained in Hill’s treatise on bees, but (and this is an important but), this material only accounts for roughly 50% of Hill’s treatise. The rest does not come from the Pantopolion and I have not found another single source where the material might have come from.
This suggests that Hill added, expanded, and altered some elements, almost doubling the word count in the process. We know that he is capable of such an act. Reading The Profitable Art of Gardening shows that Hill had good knowledge and access to classical texts written by the likes of Aristotle, Virgil, Pliny the Elder, Columella, and others.
In Hill’s beekeeping manual, the first eight chapters offer a near-perfect translation of the Pantopolion with little, if any, alterations. These chapters cover basic bee biology, including reproduction and drones, a little history and explanation of why beekeeping can be profitable, and finally a description of colony characteristics and activity. Chapters nine and ten (focusing on different types of bees and their hives respectively) are the first to contain a significant amount of extra material, although they are still based on Pictorius’ original text. The additions are mainly taken from Collumella’s De Rustica and a few choice quotes from Virgil’s Georgics. Chapter eleven is taken entirely from Pictorius, but the rest of the contents (chapters twelve through to forty-two) contain a lot of new content often, but not always alongside the material translated from Pictorius. These chapters are largely focused on managing bees, honey, drinks, and the use of wax.
Some conclusions
In a sense then, this was not just a translation of the Pantopolion, but an expansion upon it. Today we would still classify that as plagiarism, but Hill lived in a very different literary and scholarly time. He cited the original utterance of a reference either by duplicating what Pictorius had written in his Panopolion a few years earlier or (presumably) via printed copies of the original sources. He claimed the work as his own, but only in so far as acting as a compiler and translator.
It is worth returning here for a moment to Hill’s 1571 work The Contemplation of Mankind, which I mentioned earlier. Whilst Hill admitted that he translated the work of Melampus in full, the main body of the work was essentially a copy and translation of Bartolomeo Della Rocca’s work on physiognomy. Hill doesn’t mention this fact in the frontispiece or preface (or anywhere else in the book), but he does refer to Bartolomeo (Cocles) throughout the text itself as citations to the information he was offering. This was an important source (the main source by far), but this was not a direct translation, it was reframed by Hill himself in the way that the words were represented.
The way he approached that task in The Contemplation of Mankind was different than how he approached it in his A Profitable Instruction of the perfect ordering of Bees, but the effect of alteration seems to have been enough, in his eyes and perhaps his contemporaries, for the work to be linked to his name, rather than Pictorius or Cocles.
Overall, the jury is still out on whether Hill broke the rules by not referring to Pictorius. From Butler’s point of view (published nearly forty years later), he did. However, Butler is also a bit dishonest here, by not mentioning the fact that only half the text was based on the Pantopolion. The other half, it would seem, was Hill’s original compilation. From a modern point of view, this is undoubtedly plagiarism, but such a view is anachronistic.
In essence, it doesn’t matter too much. Hill’s purpose in publishing A Profitable Instruction of the perfect ordering of Bees, was to spread scholarly knowledge about beekeeping practices to a middle-class audience in England. To do this, he needed not only to translate out of Latin but also to make the text legible to a class of people with a more limited reading capability. His audience was less interested in authorial identification than they were in accessing knowledge that was otherwise restricted to those who could read Latin and could afford to access such materials.
Arguably, Charles Butler’s intention was somewhat the same, although he talked to a more literate audience in The Feminine Monarchie. However, the 1600s were a different time, than the 1560s. Recognition of the ‘author’ as being important rather than simply the original utterance of a piece of information, was beginning to change. Butler’s expectations about citations and references were different than Hill’s, as it is different than our expectations.
All of this is interesting for understanding Hill’s text and its implications for knowledge of honeybees and beekeeping in the sixteenth century. This text does not just represent the accumulated knowledge of ancient and medieval authors through the lens of an English writer, but also via a German author. That matters as it reveals that there were a lot of inter-connections in beekeeping knowledge between European countries in the sixteenth century just as there had been in previous centuries (and would be in the centuries that followed). Hill’s A Profitable Instruction of the perfect ordering of Bees is no parochial text but a compilation of all the knowledge then known about honeybees and beekeeping (at least within scholarly circles).
Sources
Butler, Charles, The Feminine Monarchie (London, 1609).
Hill, Thomas, ‘A Profitable Instruction of the perfect ordering of Bees’, in The Profitable Art of Gardening (London, 1568).
Hill, Thomas, The Contemplation of Mankind (London, 1571).
Phillpott, Matthew, The Reformation of England’s Past: John Foxe and the Revision of History in the Late Sixteenth Century (Routledge: London, 2018).
Pictorius, Georg, Pantopolion (Basel, 1563)
For the continued acceptance that Thomas Hill plagiarised his text see:
Crane, Eva, The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting (New York, 1999), p. 342.
Ebert, Adam, W., ‘Nectar for the taking: the popularization of scientific bee culture in England, 1609-1809’, Agricultural History, 85:3 (2011), pp. 322-43.
Prete, Frederick R., ‘Can Females Rule the Hive? The Controversy over Honey Bee Gender Roles in British Beekeeping Texts of the Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries’, Journal of the History of Biology, 24:1 (1991), pp. 113-144.
Woolfson, Jonathan, ‘The Renaissance of Bees’, Renaissance Studies, 24:2 (2009), pp. 281-300.