A Latin book Dialogus creaturarum optime moralizatus was published in 1480; a translation about 1520 styles it The Dialogues of Creatures Moralysed. This very rare work, which I have found fully dealt with from an Angler’s point of view only by Dr. Turrell, furnishes the earliest known illustration of an angler fishing with a float.
Next in date, and last to be noticed here, comes the famous Treatyse of Fysshynge with an Angle, printed at Westminster by Wynkyn de Worde in 1496 as part of the second edition of The Boke of St. Albans. Whether, as has been commonly supposed, Dame Juliana Berners wrote it, or whether any such lady ever existed, are points of controversy, but that The Treatyse was not an immaculate conception, without parents or ancestors, can be reasonably proved by its reference to earlier writers on fishing, and to its “these ben the xii flies ye shall use” being introduced as a precept of practice rather than a revelation of invention.
If few the forbears of what some term “not only the first angling manual in England, but also the first practical work written in any language,” its vitality and its prolific progeny admit of no doubt. According to Mr. A. Lang (who accounts for the startling fact by the increased number of people able to read owing to the spread of education) no less than ten editions of The Boke were issued within four years of publication, while Dr. Turrell limits himself to fourteen undated editions between 1500 and 1596.
Whatever the number of the editions, the need for and the vitality of The Treatyse is demonstrated by the fact that for over a hundred years no new work on Angling was printed in England, and between it and The Compleat Angler—a space of over one hundred and fifty years—there occur but four books on the subject.[110] To its prolific progeny, the Bibliotheca Piscatoria bears witness[111] in its catalogue of some fifteen hundred authors and of countless books, MSS. etc.
We owe, it is said, this voluminous literature to the geographical position of England, which lends itself very favourably to the pursuit of all kinds of fishing. Can we, also, flatteringly add the other factor of Lacépède’s dictum, “Il y a cette différence entre la chasse et la pêche, que cette dernière convient aux peuples les plus civilisés?”
But the pursuit of fishing did not prevail in early England or Scotland. A passage in Bede (probably used by Henry of Huntingdon), which has, I think, escaped the many-eyed net of our fishing authors, testifies to its absence in the former.
St. Wilfrid (born 634) on his return from Friesland, where fishing yielded the staple of food, met with such success in his mission to the South Saxons that he not only converted them, “with all the priests of the Idols,” but also—“which was a great relief unto them”—taught them the craft of fishing, of which, save eeling, they wotted naught. Collecting under the Saint’s order eel-nets where they could, the first adventurers meritis sui patris Divina largitate adjuti[112] enmeshed three hundred fishes, which they equally divided between the poor, the net-owners, and themselves.
The Celtæ, with some exceptions such as the scomber-catching Celtiberi, eschewed fish, probably from religious prejudices, which owing to their adoration of the springs, rivers, and waters prevented the eating of their denizens.
Whatever the cause, Dion Cassius expressly comments on the abstinence of the Caledonians, although their seas and rivers abounded with food.[113] In time the example of the clergy and the ordinance of fast days gradually overcame—save in the case of Eels, which still remain to the Highlander an abomination—their obstinate antipathy. Across St. George’s Channel the Irish two centuries ago “had little skill in catching fish.”[114]
But when the Western Highlanders did go a-fishing, their prayers and promises—prompted by the same principle of gratitude being a sense of favours to come—echo the prayers and promises, Dis mutatis, of the Anthologia Palatina.