: The boke of Saint Albans by Berners Juliana Blades William Author Of Introduction Etc - Hunting Early works to 1800; Falconry Early works to 1800; Heraldry Early works to 1800

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BY DAME JULIANA BERNERS

CONTAINING

TREATISES ON HAWKING, HUNTING, AND COTE ARMOUR:

PRINTED AT SAINT ALBANS BY THE SCHOOLMASTER-PRINTER IN 1486

REPRODUCED IN FACSIMILE

WILLIAM BLADES

LONDON ELLIOT STOCK, PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C.

Several independent printing presses were established in England before the close of the fifteenth century; and from them issued numerous books which are invaluable to all students of antiquity from the light they throw upon the social habits and literary progress of our nation. Of these it may safely be said that not one exceeds in interest that work of an unknown typographer, which is here presented in facsimile, and which, from the town in which it was compiled, as well as printed, is known to all bibliographers as "The Book of St. Albans." This work has always been a favourite, partly because our feelings are appealed to in favour of the writer who for centuries has taken rank as England's earliest poetess, and is still, in all our Biographical Dictionaries, reckoned among "noble authors;" and partly because we love mysteries, and a mystery has always enshrouded the nameless printer. The subjects, too, so curiously alliterative--Hawking, Hunting, and Heraldry, have an enticing and antique flavour about them, being just those with which, at that period, every man claiming to be "gentle" was expected to be familiar; while ignorance of their laws and language was to confess himself a "churl."

Looking at the book, then, all round, it will be a convenient plan to consider these subjects separately, and to treat the volume in its four aspects of Authorship, Typography and Bibliography, Subject-matter, and Philology.

In this very book we have a striking instance of such erroneous attribution. The three treatises, of which the book is made up, are quite distinct, and to a portion only of one of these is there any author's name attached. Yet that name, "Dam Julyans Barnes," altered by degrees to "Dame Juliana Berners," is now universally received as the name of the authoress of the whole volume. With even less show of reason she is credited with the authorship of a "Treatise on Fishing" for which there is not the shadow of evidence, that treatise having been added ten years later by Wynken de Worde, who, when reprinting the Book of St. Albans, thought that the subject of Fishing would complete the work as a Gentleman's Vade Mecum.

There are really four distinct tractates in the Book of St. Albans, although the two last being on Heraldry are generally counted as one.

The first is on Hawking; to this no name of the author is attached, but it has a prologue which no one acquainted with the other writings of the printer can doubt to be his. Of this we shall have more to say anon.

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