6 HUNTING. 



of mystery hung for a long while over the lady and her work, 

 nor indeed has it ever been wholly cleared away. Her name 

 has been variously printed as Barnes, Bernes and Berners. 

 Even her sex was for a time doubtful, for Baker, in his 

 Chronicles, supposing Julyan (as her Christian name was 

 originally printed) must needs be a man's name, describes the 

 worthy prioress as 'a gentleman of excellent gifts, who wrote 

 certain treatises of Hawking and Hunting.' Nor is her share 

 in ' The Boke ' known for certain. By earlier authorities she 

 was held to have been responsible for all three divisions of the 

 volume, Hawking, Hunting, and Heraldry ; by the latest, Mr. 

 William Blades (in the preface to his edition of ' The Boke ' 

 published in 1881), she is dismissed with sad contempt as 

 having ' probably lived at the beginning of the fifteenth century, 

 and possibly compiled from existing MSS. some rhymes on 

 hunting.' Yet, as a matter of fact, this is all that a strictly 

 conscientious historian can permit himself to say about her. 

 Down to a late period she was popularly supposed to have pre- 

 sided over Sopwell Nunnery in Hertfordshire, a house founded 

 about 1140 under the rule of St. Benedict, and subject to the 

 Abbot of St. Albans ; subject indeed in late years after a fashion 

 not contemplated, let us hope, by its original founders. This 

 conjecture, one would have thought, might have rendered her 

 authorship of a book on field sports, to say the least, somewhat 

 problematical. But the obstacle was satisfactorily removed by 

 the further supposition that our dame's youth was passed at 

 Court, where she would naturally have joined in all fashion- 

 able amusements. Unfortunately for the history-makers, Mr. 

 Blades has pointed out that in the lists of the Prioresses of 

 Sopwell for the fifteenth century no such name as Barnes or 

 Berners is to be found. He also mentions another curious fact 

 on the authority of Mr. Halliwell-Phillips, which may possibly 

 help to explain the mystery, though he does not precisely venture 

 to say so. It seems that men called Berners were employed 

 by the sportsmen of that century to wait upon them with relays of 

 horses second horsemen, in fact and also to feed the hounds. 



