Trivial, worthless. Beans apparently have been considered of little value since the thirteenth century. Chaucer, in Troilus and Criseyde (ca. 1380), wrote, “Swich [such] arguments ne been nat worth a bene.” The hill part of the expression refers to a common method of planting beans. Instead of arranging the seeds in a row, they can be planted in small clumps of four or five seeds in a little mound or hill of soil. This practice is followed principally in American home gardens (rather than by commercial growers), and indeed the expression “hill of beans” originated in America in the nineteenth century.