Inmates’ report?

Occasionally, it can be desperate to compose a fishing report when no inmates have sent their weekend catch results and photos. Hence TRM’s report reverts to historic accounts from abroad…

Hi Ross, I’m currently in Scotland and have just visited the oldest library in the country in Innerpeffery.  I discovered a section on trout and salmon fishing.  This chapter in the book caught my eye … very sage advice in the first paragraph, I thought.

I do not know how old the book was which brings us on to the first accounts of fly fishing… Back then all fishing gear was constructed by the anglers. Imagine doing that these days!

The person with the best claim to be the author of the first English-language book on fishing is Dame Juliana Berners.

She was the abbess at Sopwell priory near St Albans close to where the River Ver flows. The book ‘The treatise of fishing with an angle’ was printed in 1496 as part of the second book of St Albans. This was not very long after the printing industry took off. An even older manuscript version dating from around 1450 also exists, with both versions believed to be copies of the original text from around 1420.

The joys of fishing

The book opens with an analysis: ‘of the honourable pastimes of hunting, hawking, fowling and fishing’. Dame Juliana concludes ‘that the best of these is fishing with rod, line and hook’. Anglers’ appreciation of the surroundings gets mention: ‘the angler hears the melodious harmony of birds, seeing young swans, herons, ducks, coots and many other birds with their broods’. There is no mention of cormorants or goosanders. Anglers were advised not to lay too long in bed for ‘whoever will rise early will be holy, healthy and happy’. That’s still sound advice 600 years later.

Making fishing rods

There was no mail order or online shopping back then, with tackle shops equally thin on the ground. Making your own tackle was clearly the way to go. ‘You must cut, between Michaelmas and Candlemas, a fair staff, a fathom and a half long (around nine feet) and as thick as your arm, of hazel, willow or aspen. Soak it in a hot oven and set it straight. Then let it cool and dry for a month.’ And the advice continues, later describing about the upper section of the rod can be made from blackthorn, crabtree, medlar or juniper.

Obtaining fishing line

Line was made of white horse tail hair. She recommends producing lines of six different colours, yellow, green, brown, tawny, russet and dusky and outlines the dyeing process in some details. Juliana advised the use of different coloured lines for different waters and in different seasons. ‘Green line should be used in all clear water from April till September with yellow the best choice in the autumn’ as ‘it is like the weeds and other kinds of grass which grow in the waters and rivers, when they are broken’.

Line diameters

Juliana was well acquainted with the need for the right line strength for the different species. For a minnow, a line of one hairs thickness was sufficient whilst double the strength (two hairs thickness) was ample for growing roach, gudgeon, bleak and ruffe. Three strands were necessary for dace and great roach with four strands recommended for perch, flounder and small bream. For pike, she recommended the line be strengthened with wire.

Hook manufacture

Juliana describes hook making as the: ‘subtlest and hardest art’. The process required having access to a range of equipment from files, tongs and anvils through to hammers and knives. Needles made of steel were taken and heated till they were red hot. After cooling, they could be filed, tempered and bent. Once the hook was made, the horse hair hook-length was attached making sure that the line was attached on the inside and not the outside of the hook.

Float making

Juliana gave us the following advice. ‘Take a good cork that is clean, without many holes and bore it through with a small hot iron. Then insert a quill into it, even and straight. The larger the float, the larger the quill and the larger the hole’. For minnow fishing: ‘the float should be no larger than a pea, when targeting species with a line of two hairs thickness, a float the size of a bean was recommended and so ‘every line according to proportion’. There we have it; the concept of balanced tackle is not new after all.

Advice for those struggling to catch

Even in the 5th century, anglers didn’t always bag up. Dame Juliana lists: ‘twelve kinds of impediment which cause a man to catch no fish, apart from other common causes which may happen by chance’.

1. If your tackle is not adequately or suitably made
2. If your baits are not good or fine
3. If you do not angle in biting time
4. If the fish are frightened by the sight of a man
5. If the water is very thick, white or red from any flood recently fallen
6. If the fish do not stir because of the cold
7. If the weather is hot
8. If it rains
9. If it hails or snow falls
10. If there is a tempest
11. If there is a great wind
12. If the wind is in the east (the fish will not bite then)

Game fish

The salmon: ‘the stateliest fish, is a noble fish but cumbersome to catch’. Earthworms were the recommended bait early and late in the season with ‘grub worms that grow in dunghills’ a midseason option. Fly fishing was already a recognised method in the 1400s. ‘You may catch him, (but it is seldom seen) with an artificial fly at such times that he leaps’. Juliana goes on to describe the trout as ‘a right dainty fish and a right fervent biter’. Options for catching include ‘a minnow on the hook and a ground line with an earthworm as bait with lampreys the recommended bait in the month of April. The grayling, or umber is a delicious fish to a man’s mouth. A range of baits, according to season, are listed for catching the ‘lady of the stream’ such as ‘dock worms, hawthorn worms and the bait that grows on a fern leaf’.

Izaak Walton

It is impossible to do full justice to the treatise of fishing with an angle in one article. Indeed, whole books have been written on the mysterious Dame Juliana. Some argue she has nothing to do with the treatise but best I know, no named person has a better claim to its authorship.

Dame Juliana may be SWMBO’s favourite but the better known historic angler was Izaak Walton who wrote the “Compleat Angler” –

The Compleat Angler

In his book, The Compleat Angler, Izaak Walton, who died three hundred years ago this month, provided generations of anglers with a technique manual, a pastoral idyll – and an elegant apologia for their pastime.

An Article by John Lowerson.

Izaak Walton died on December 15th, 1683, at the age of ninety. His book, The Compleat Angler , is held to be the most influential work ever written on sport fishing; certainly it is by far the most frequently reprinted. His contemporary importance was much greater than that of the author of an idyll and his subsequent rediscovery has placed him as the father-figure, if by no means the actual progenitor, of the largest single participant outdoor recreation in the industrial world. Because of this role his life has been moderately well-plotted by scholars; many of the facts are clear yet there remain questions about his personal experiences which have rarely been treated by historians of seventeenth-century England.

An immediate success when if was first published in 1653, Walton’s classic celebration of the joys of fishing continues to captivate anglers and nature lovers with its timeless advice and instruction.  Originally cast in the form of a dialogue between an experienced angler named Piscator and his pupil Viator, the book details methods for catching, eating, and savouring all varieties of fish, from the common chub to the lordly salmon. More than an engaging guide to the subtle intricacies of the sport, Walton’s reflective treatise is a graceful portrait of rural England that extols the pleasures of country life.  

‘The Compleat Angler is not about how to fish but about how to be,’ said novelist Thomas McGuane. ‘[Walton] spoke of an amiable mortality and rightness on the earth that has been envied by his readers for three hundred years.’