Note 364 — Chapter IX · THE FIRST MENTION OF A FLY

“Dapping,” to which I miss allusion even in Dr. Turrell’s excellent Ancient Angling Authors, is so often regarded as a more or less modern method that, even at the risk of a portentous note, I must record my reasons for differing in toto from this view. Walton certainly employed it in the seventeenth century. Pursuing the device further back, it is distinctly enjoined in the earliest fishing treatise in English, the earlier version of The Boke of St. Albans (i.e. a MS. of about 1450 printed from a MS. in the possession of A. Denison, Esq., with Preface and Glossary by T. Satchell, London, 1883), and seems, although not clearly described, surely specified as follows: In “How many maner of Anglynges that ther bene ... The IIIIth with a mener for the troute with owte plumbe or floote the same maner of Roche and Darse with a lyne of I or II herys batyd with a flye. The Vth is with a dubbed hooke for the troute and graylyng....” This passage draws a decided distinction between baiting with a fly and a dubbed hook, or artificial fly. But no lead (plumbe) or float was to be used, therefore the method intended seems without doubt “dapping,” which warrants, to my mind, the assumption that this device is as old as the earliest instructions in English. This older form of the Treatise seems, it is true, to have differed slightly from the version used for The Boke of St. Albans in 1496. T. Satchell held that they both had a common origin in the “bokes of credence,” which are mentioned in the latter, and may, he suggests, have been French, but of this I am doubtful, principally because the French and English traditions appear to me to have marked points of difference.