Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

hnitanturFLY PROBABLY ARTIFICIAL—DAPPING 157To my mind, however, the scale dips deeply in favour of theartificial fly for the following reasons.1. The trend and purpose of the whole passage, especiallywhen we note carefully the preceding verse and a half, ' ' Odidolosas munerum et malas artes.\hamos dona," is toinveigh against fraudful gifts, typical of which fraudful fliesare singled out—in fact, against all presents which are notwhat they appear. Mr. A. B. Cook writes ": I quite agreewith your view that the passage gains much, ifall three linesare made to refer to an artificial fly with a hook concealed in it.Indeed, that is pretty obviously the meaning."2. The difficulty which the ancients would have experiencedin impaling, etc., on one of their hooks a natural fly would havebeen greater than dressing an artificial one. The smallesthook in the Greek-Roman Collection at the British Museum(found at Amathus in Cyprus 1894) measures over I in. breadthat the bend.i If we allow that owing to oxidation the metalmay have coarsened and swollen, the task of impaling, andfurther of fastening a natural fly securely enough to withstandthe buffets of even wavelets of the sea (for N.B, the Scarus isAncient Angling Authors, is so often regarded as a more or less modern methodthat, even at the risk of a portentous note, I must record my reasons fordiffering in toto from this view. Walton certainly employed it in the seventeenthcentury. Pursuing the device further back, it is distinctl}^ enjoined in theearliest fishing treatise in English, the earlier version of The Boke oj 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 manymaner of Anglynges that ther bene . . . The Illlth with a mener for thetroute with owte plumbe or floote the same maner of Roche and Darse with alyne of I or II herys batyd with a flye. The Vth is with a dubbed hooke forthe troute and graylyng .", . This passage draws a decided distinctionbetween 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 withoutdoubt " dapping," which warrants, to my mind, the assumption that thisdevice is as old as the earliest instructions in English. This older form of theTreatise seems, it is true, to have differed slightly from the version used for TheBoke of St. Albans in 149'i. T. Satchell held that they both had a commonorigin 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 becausethe French and English traditions appear to me to have marked points ofdifference.^ The two smallest perfect hooks scale about No. 10 and No. 11 respectivelyin the old, and 5 and 4 in the new numbering. They are considerably smallerthan the Kahun (XII Dynasty) hook, which Petrie believes to be the smallestknown in ancient Egypt. Cf. his Tools and Weapons (London, 1917), p. 37 f.But the Kahun hooks scale Nos. 9 and 6 respectively.