That wasn't my personal opinion, but the considered assessment of Chambers' 20th Century Dictionary. That's the only one I have to hand at home, but I doubt if any of the major dictionaries would tell you anything significantly different. 19th century publications containing NE dialect spell the word hinny about half the time, and honey the rest.

Don't allow the fact that honey has acquired a narrower meaning since then to confuse you: hinny is a dialectal form of that word, and like many dialectal forms has retained an older, more general sense. We shouldn't try to re-invent linguistic history in order to make the past conform to the preconceptions of the present.%-)