CHAPTER III

IN all catalogues of old works on angling the following book is included, though except for its misleading title, it contains nothing to warrant its inclusion.

A BOOKE OF ANGLING OR FISHING

WHEREIN IS SHEWED BY CONFERENCE WITH SCRIPTURES, THE AGREEMENT BETWEENE THE FISHERMAN, FISHES, FISHING OF BOTH NATURES TEMPORALL AND SPIRITUALL

By SAMUEL GARDINER

Doctor of Divinitie, London

PRINTED by THOMAS PURFOOT

1606

The contents of the book are thus summed up by the author:-"The summe of the following Treatise is abridged in these two verses :

"Ecclesiam pro nave rego mihi climata mundi
Sunt mare: scriptura retia: piscis homo.

THE

Secrets of Angling:

TEACHING,

Printed at London, for Roger Iackson, and are to be fould at his fhop neere Fleetftreet Conduit, 1613.

Title-page of The Secrets of Angling.

[To face page 43.

"Which I deliver in English thus:—

"The church I governe as a shippe
Wee, Seas with world compare
The scriptures are enclosing nettes
And men the fishes are."

Of the old angling works there are three which stand out from the rest and form a class by themselves of pre-eminent interest and value. The first of these, the Treatyse of ffysshynge wyth an Angle, we have already dealt with; the second, The Secrets of Angling, we have now to discuss; and the third, Walton's deservedly famous Compleat Angler, will be considered in a later chapter.

The Secrets of Angling, by J. D., was first published in 1613, and while it revealed many secrets of angling, the secret of its author's name was for many years unsolved. Walton attributed the work to John Davors; Howlett and others to Donne or Davies. It was not until 1811 that the author's name was discovered to be John Dennys, from the following entry in the Stationers' Registers, " 23 Non. Martii" 1612 (i.e. 1613): "Master Roger Jackson entred for his copie under thands of Master Mason and Master Warden Hooper, a booke called The Secrets of Angling, teaching the choysest tooles, bates, and seasons, for the taking of any fish, in pond, or river, practised and opened in three bookes by John Dennys Esquier, Vid."

Dennys was a member of an old Gloucestershire family residing at Pucklechurch in that county. A

stream, dividing the parish of Pucklechurch from the parish of Dyrham, is one of the sources of a brook called the Boyd, which Dennys mentions in his book, a fact which would afford confirmation, were it needed, of his claim to the authorship of the work:

And thou, sweet Boyd, that with thy watry sway
Dost wash the cliffs of Deignton and of Weeke.
And through their Rockes with crooked winding way,
Thy mother Avon runnest softe to seeke;

In whose fayre streams the speckled Trout doth play.

Usually when an author attempts to teach the practice of an art in a poem, his work either possesses no poetic value or else is too vague and indefinite to be of any service in teaching the art; perhaps, however, the most common result of such an attempt is that it fails both as a poem and as a treatise.

In the difficult task of combining poetry and instruction it must be admitted that Dennys, in The Secrets of Angling, has been completely successful; for whether his work be viewed as a poem or as a practical treatise, it deserves the highest praise. From a practical point of view it possesses that merit very rare in angling books, originality; and the value of the instructions given, is shown by the extent to which they have been copied in the prose works which followed it. Some of the advice, as for instance, that in regard to the colour of the angler's clothes, remains unaltered in angling books at the present day; while to show the high estimation in