North Country spider article

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Anherd
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Re: North Country spider article

Post by Anherd » Wed Feb 12, 2020 12:40 pm

Anyone prepared to speculate about why popular belief has it that the Treatyse was written by a nun?
wsbailey
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Re: North Country spider article

Post by wsbailey » Wed Feb 12, 2020 1:00 pm

No clue but the person was obviously literate. It would had to have been someone with the means to acquire an education. Royalty seemed to more concerned with hunting if the tapestries of the era are any indication. Monasteries were probably often located near rivers since they would have to be self sufficient and rivers provided a food source. Royal outings would involve retinues and retinues are anathema to successful fishing. Also, in the Treatyse, fishing is prescribed as a contemplative sport; a concept well known in a monastery.
wsbailey
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Re: North Country spider article

Post by wsbailey » Wed Feb 12, 2020 1:49 pm

While black might have been a challenging color for a Medieval dyer; scraps of professionally dyed black yarn were probably readily available. Perhaps more so than black sheep. Much of English wool was sent abroad to be manufactured into cloth. A load contaminated with a few dark hairs could be rejected; a serious financial loss. Ireland obviously had lots of sheep of different natural colors as revealed by all of the beautiful wool blends in their tweeds. Some of the Irish colors, that have so befuddled tyers, may have been a result of dyeing over natural color wool. I’m thinking of some of the clarets and olives.
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Roadkill
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Re: North Country spider article

Post by Roadkill » Thu Feb 13, 2020 11:23 am

Anherd wrote: Wed Feb 12, 2020 12:40 pm Anyone prepared to speculate about why popular belief has it that the Treatyse was written by a nun?
I subscribe to the idea of the "Legend of Dame Juliana" as described in John McDonald's The Origins Of Angling.

Considering the original incomplete Manuscript (about 1450) and the first printed Treatise 1496 did not contain an author, I find compelling the idea that William Burton's hand written notes on blank pages of the first Book Of Saint Albans in the Cambridge University Library might have been the source of this holy inspiration of a nun's work. ;)

P.S, Andrew I love The History of Fly Fishing Volume Two that arrived 2 days ago. Any chance you have a list of modern feather substitutes for wings and hackles used in 1496-1916 we don't have available? :)
Mike62
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Re: North Country spider article

Post by Mike62 » Thu Feb 13, 2020 6:45 pm

What I think I know of the mysteries surrounding Berners comes from McDonald as well. There was also a paper put out by the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville entitled "A Flourynge Aege: Tracing the Sacred and the Secular in the Book of St.Albans" by Allison Treese.

https://scholarworks.uark.edu/cgi/viewc ... ontext=etd

It's 36 pages and if the house is quiet and you've got a fresh pot of coffee on, it's an interesting read.
wsbailey
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Re: North Country spider article

Post by wsbailey » Thu Feb 13, 2020 8:22 pm

That looks like a really interesting read. I’m waiting for a more peaceful time to read it. I dyed some wool yarn with Medieval era dyes and colors. The problem for me is that most tyers know a lot more about the current state of the art than the Middle Ages. So I’m hesitant to show them to anyone. I once showed the yarn to a woman at a yarn store and she wouldn’t believe that I used natural dyes because the colors are so bright. So they had bright colors; just not very many of them. Only a few natural dyes are really durable. These would be favored for a tapestry in a cathedral, for example. A shop producing inferior goods wouldn’t be around long. Most dyeing was done by professionals. The average person or even the well off didn’t have access to the necessary equipment or supplies. Even with the relatively small amount of stuff that I dye; I still use a lot of water. Any dye shop would have to be near a spring or a river. So the idea of a fisherman dyeing his own wool to match the hatch makes no sense at all.
Last edited by wsbailey on Wed Feb 19, 2020 10:21 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Theroe
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Re: North Country spider article

Post by Theroe » Fri Feb 14, 2020 8:21 am

Mike62 wrote: Thu Feb 13, 2020 6:45 pm What I think I know of the mysteries surrounding Berners comes from McDonald as well. There was also a paper put out by the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville entitled "A Flourynge Aege: Tracing the Sacred and the Secular in the Book of St.Albans" by Allison Treese.

https://scholarworks.uark.edu/cgi/viewc ... ontext=etd

It's 36 pages and if the house is quiet and you've got a fresh pot of coffee on, it's an interesting read.
Mike has ALL the goodies: article resources, snowshoe bunny feet, grouse wings, and oh yes, that lovely red cattle fur!!
Soft and wet - the only way....
wsbailey
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Re: North Country spider article

Post by wsbailey » Sun Feb 16, 2020 4:08 pm

The download goes to show, that without any new documentation, the mystery continues. Another recent discussion can be found in “The Poetics of Angling in Early Modern England”. The materials are more interesting to me though. John McDonald appears to favor John Waller Hills view that the Maure fly represents the Green Drake fly. Skues believed that it represented the Alder fly. But Hills also says that maure means mulberry coloured. Here is my two cents worth. By time the Treatyse was written; English had acquired a huge influx of French vocabulary due to the Norman invasion of 1066. These French words were still spoken as they would be in French. So if we pronounce mauré as Murray; then it sounds like the word murrey which is the name for purplish red.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murrey
wsbailey
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Re: North Country spider article

Post by wsbailey » Mon Feb 17, 2020 10:44 am

daringduffer
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Re: North Country spider article

Post by daringduffer » Tue Feb 18, 2020 2:28 pm

wsbailey wrote: Mon Feb 17, 2020 10:44 am Alfred Ronalds Alder Fly

https://archive.org/details/flyfishento ... 9/mode/1up
Bill Bailey - our investigator. Thanks.

dd
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