Nothing definite is known of the reputed authoress, Dame Juliana Barnes or Berners. She is said to have been a daughter of Sir James Berners of Roding Berners in the county of Essex, a favourite of King Richard the Second, who was beheaded in 1388 as an evil counsellor to the king and an enemy to the public weal. She was celebrated for her extreme beauty and great learning, and is reported to have held the office of prioress of the Benedictine Nunnery of Sopwell in Hertfordshire, a cell to the Abbey of St. Alban, but of this no documentary evidence exists. The first edition of her “Book of St. Alban’s,” printed by the schoolmaster-printer of St. Alban’s in 1486, treats of hawking, hunting, and coat-armour. In the next edition, “Enprynted at Westmestre by Wynkyn the Worde the yere of thyncarnacōn of our lorde. M . CCCC . lxxxxvi,” among the other “treatyfes perteynynge to hawkynge & huntynge with other dyuers playsaunt materes belongynge vnto noblesse,” appeared the present treatise on angling. The aristocratic instincts of the authoress prompted this mode of publication, as she herself explains in the concluding paragraph—“by cause that this present treatyse sholde not come to the hondys of eche ydle persone whyche wolde desire it yf it were enprynted allone by itself & put in a lytyll plaunflet, therfore I haue compylyd it in a greter volume of dyuerse bokys concernynge to gentyll & noble men to the entent that the forsayd ydle persones whyche sholde haue but lytyll mesure in the sayd dysporte of fysshyng sholde not by this meane vtterly dystroye it.” The present publication is the “little pamphlet” which was enclosed in this “greater volume.” An edition of it as a distinct treatise appears to have been issued by Wynkyn de Worde soon after that of 1496, with the title, “Here begynnyth a treatyse of fysshynge wyth an Angle” over the curious woodcut of the man fishing which is on the first page of the present _facsimile_, but only one copy of it is known to be in existence. At least ten more editions appeared before the year 1600. This shows the great popularity of the book at the time of its publication, and considering how human nature remains the same, and the charms of angling are equally grateful to every fresh generation of anglers, affords a sufficient reason for the strong antiquarian delight which all literary anglers of the present century have felt in the book. It is worth while briefly to trace the bibliography of angling onwards until the appearance in 1653 of Walton’s _Compleat Angler_, when the reader will be on familiar ground. In the interval of more than a hundred and fifty years between these two names of Berners and Walton, so deeply reverenced by every true scholar of the craft, there occur but four books on angling, though each one of these possesses a fame peculiar to itself. First came Leonard Mascall’s _Booke of Fishing with Hooke and Line_, published in 1590.