Note 216 — THE ENVIRONS OF SHREWSBURY

Mr. Thomas Barker, author of a work on angling, was born at this village. From the singular vein of humour which runs through his book, he appears to have been a good-humoured gossiping old man. In the dedication he states, “I have written no more but my own experience and practice, and have set forth the true ground of angling, which I have been gathering these three-score years; having spent many pounds in the gaining of it, as is well known in the place where I was born and educated, which is Bracemeale, in the liberty of Salop, being a freeman and burgess of the same city.”—‘Barker’s Delight, or the Art of Angling,’ was published a few years after Izaak Walton’s Complete Angler (1659), to which Mr. Barker appears to have contributed the greater part of what is said on Fly Fishing.