SPORTING LITERATURE. 15 



from oral tradition? That is possible, but so 

 unlikely that the conclusion appears to be that 

 the Treatise as we know it is drawn from a 

 series of manuscripts now lost or unknown. 

 These books of credence, if English, will 

 probably never be seen : for England has been 

 searched pretty closely in the last thirty or forty 

 years. But if they are French, they may still 

 lie undiscovered in some French abbey. Blakey, 

 writing in 1846, says in his Historical Sketches 

 of the Angling Literature of all Nations, a 

 readable though unreliable work, that a few 

 years earlier a paper had been read to a society 

 of antiquaries at Arras on an old manuscript 

 on fishing, dating from the year 1000, and 

 found among the remains of the valuable 

 library of the abbey of St. Bertin at St. Omer. 

 Since that paper was read much has happened 

 at Arras in Artois. Many have gone there 

 who never heard of it before, and who have 

 gone there for other purposes than to listen to 

 learned disquisitions on a peaceful sport; who 

 have, like Chaucer's squire, 



ben somtyme in chevauchee 

 In Flandres, in Artoys, and in Picardie. 



Many have made that journey and have not 

 returned. If such manuscripts still exist in 

 Arras in Artois, they will be hard to find. 



Such is the history, and such are the probable 

 origins, of the Treatise of Fishing with an 

 Angle. It now remains to examine the book 

 itself. 



