Dame Juliana Berners

Dame Juliana Berners (flourished 1460) was an Englishwoman of letters and the purported author of A Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle (1496), the earliest known volume on sport fishing. Berners’s work predates Englishman Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler (1653), the best-known example of early angling literature, by approximately 150 years.

Life and work

Little is known or recorded about Berners’s life, other than her supposed authorship of the Treatyse. Several 16th-century sources claim that she was a daughter or granddaughter of Sir James Berners, an attendant of King Richard II, and that she was a prioress of the Sopwell Nunnery near Saint Albans, England, during the late 15th century. Various accounts of the history of fishing literature describe her as a woman of keen intellect and an accomplished practitioner and avid devotee of outdoor sports, including angling and hunting.

Despite its antiquity Treatyse remains a remarkable work for its detail and vision. At least 16 editions of the book were published before 1600. A comprehensive guide for the anglers of its time, the book contains substantial information on fishing destinations, rod and line construction, and selection of natural baits and preferred artificial fly dressings, categorized by the season of their optimum utility. Perhaps most notable are the essays on the virtues of conservation, respecting the rights of streamside landowners, and anglers’ etiquette. These concepts would not come to be commonly accepted and advocated in the angling world until 400 years after the publication of the Treatyse, yet today they embody the ethical bedrock of sport fishing.

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Legacy

Numerous women’s fly-fishing clubs and associations in the United States and Europe are named for Berners in tribute to her legacy as the first author of either gender to chronicle the fine points of the sport of angling. Many of the methods described in the Treatyse are remarkably modern and continue to be used in various forms.