The imitation of the MACEDONIAN FLY was simple: ‘They fasten red wool around a hook, and fix onto the hook two feathers which grow under a cock’s wattle, and which in colour are like wax’. Or, to give it as a tyer’s recipe:
Hook: Not given; suggest dry fly, size 14.
Thread: Not given; suggest red or brown.
Body: Red wool.
Wings: Two wax-coloured cock hackle points. [Wax coloured? Beeswax is a light creamy-buff.]
It seems clear that fly-fishing is a very ancient way of catching fish. Andrew Herd traced it back as far, perhaps, as the ninth century BC, and showed that by the early Middle Ages (late twelfth and early thirteenth century) fly-fishing was well established in Japan, in Spain, in central Europe and in Britain. The central European school is especially interesting for it produced an early fifteenth-century Bavarian manuscript, translated into English by Professor Richard Hoffmann, and called Fisher’s Craft and Lettered Art. It included flies for catching several species of European freshwater fish, but the way the flies were tied and some of the terms used (for example, ‘stingel’) are not clear in their meaning. Two examples are given below. The resultant flies were tied with a great deal of guesswork!
BAVARIAN CHUB FLY
This is an imitation of a beetle called ‘wengril’. ‘The feathering should be black brown with the silks green and black and around the stingel green and brown.’
BAVARIAN PIKE FLY
The feathering should be of different sorts mixed together, with lead coloured and light blackish and ash coloured therein a black feather, with the silk pale coloured and around the heart black light blue silk, around the stingel pinkish coloured silk.
It is highly likely that many other manuscripts describing flytying and fly-fishing were produced in the early Middle Ages. Some will have been destroyed; others may be hidden deep in the vast library of the Vatican or in some other dustgathering ancient corner. There can be no doubt, however, that the compiler of the first printed book on fishing used several of these manuscripts as sources.
THE FIRST FLIES TO APPEAR IN PRINT
William Caxton was born in Kent in about 1420. In 1441 he left England for Bruges and then Cologne, where he learnt the art and business of being a printer. In 1474 he published the first book ever to be printed in the English language, The Recuyell of the Histories of Troye. Two years later, Caxton returned to England and set up a printing press in London at Westminster, where he printed 96 books. One of these was The Book of Hawking, Hunting and Blasing of Arms, published in 1486, and also known as The Boke of St Albans. When Caxton died in 1491 his German assistant Wynkyn de Worde took over the press and, in 1496, he produced a new edition of The Boke of St Albans. This included the first slender volume on angling, A Treatyse of Fysshynge with an Angle. Many years later the authorship of the Treatyse was attributed to an abbess called Dame Juliana Berners, but there is no documentary evidence that she ever existed (see Fred Buller and Hugh Falkus, Dame Juliana, the Angling Treatyse and its Mysteries, 2001). What is certain is that Wynkyn gathered the material contained in the Treatyse from across Europe, something no fictitious abbess could ever have done.
The opening page of the Treatyse of 1496. The gist of the introduction to the Treatyse is that fly-fishers live a long and happy life: ‘Here begins the Treatyse of fishing with an angle [rod]. Solomon in his parables says that a good spirit makes for a flowering age, that is, a fair age and a long one …’ Note that fishing vests and waders had not been invented in 1496!
The Treatyse outlined twelve artificial flies, but the way that they were tied is unknown. Sadly few, if any, actual flies tied before the middle of the nineteenth century have survived, for natural silk threads rot in light and humid conditions, and moth and mites move in quickly to devastate unprotected fur and feather. So any modern tyings of these flies may not be as they were tied more than 500 years ago. Two fly-tying historians produced plates of flies for Buller and Falkus (2001): Malcolm Greenhalgh and Jack Heddon. Examination of the plates in Buller and Falkus will reveal differences between their tyings – the set illustrated below were tied afresh by Greenhalgh without reference to his earlier tyings. Again there are differences in interpretation. It is quite likely that different tyers five centuries ago, having only the Treatyse as reference, would have tied the flies differently. The same applies to the other ancient flies illustrated in this section.
In the following, medieval spellings have been modernised.
FOR MARCH
THE DUN FLY
The body of dun wool and the wings of the partridge.
ANOTHER DUN FLY
The body of black wool; the wings of the blackest drake and the jay under the wings and under the tail.
FOR APRIL
THE STONE-FLY
The body of black wool and yellow under the wings and under the tail, and the wings of the drake.
IN THE BEGINNING OF MAY
A GOOD FLY
The body of red wool and ribbed with black silk; the wings of the drake and of the red capon’s hackle.
MAY
THE YELLOW FLY
The body of yellow wool, the wings of the red cock’s hackle and that of the drake dyed yellow.
JUNE
THE BLACK LOUPER
The body of black wool and ribbed with the herl of the peacock’s tail and the wings of the capon with a blue head.
THE DUN CUT
The body of black wool and a yellow band along either side; the wings of the buzzard tied on with barked hemp.