Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 04.djvu/395

 Nunnery, in Hertfordshire.' The pedigree may be found p. 11 (, Boke of St. Albans, London, 1810, fol.), drawn out in full. It is enough to note here that Sir John Berners of Berners Roding, Essex, died in 1347. His son, Sir James, father of Dame Juliana, was beheaded on Tower Hill in 1388. The family branched out into Sir Humphrey Bourchier, who was slain at Barnet 1471, fighting for Edward IV, and was a son of one Margery Berners. His son was the translator of Froissart. Thence it stretches to Jane, mother of Sir Thomas Knyvet, whose great-great-grandson left a sole heir, Katharine. She married Richard Bokenham, to whom the barony of Berners was adjudged in 1720. The dame is said to have spent her youth probably at the court, and to have shared m the woodland sports then fashionable, thus acquiring a competent knowledge of hunting, hawking, and fishing. Having withdrawn 'from the world, and finding plenty of leisure in the cloister after being raised to the position of prioress, it is next believed that she committed to writing her experience of these sports. As for fishing, if she were an active prioress, the exigencies of fasting days would demand that she should busy herself in the supply of fish required for the sisterhood. Like all observant anglers, she would daily learn more of that craft as she grew older, and so she naturally treats of it more fully and in a clearer order than the other subjects of the 'Boke' are handled. The title 'dame' did not of itself imply in the fifteenth century any connection with nobility; 'it meant simply mistress or Mrs., says Mr. Blades (p. 10). 'Had the Dame Julyans Barnes of the fifteenth century, lived now, she would have been just "Mrs. Barnes."' But this is somewhat too broadly stated. The usual account of this title is that the lady was one of the sisters called Dames, as she was able to pay the little community for her maintenance, and so was placed on a higher footing than the ordinary nun, who performed menial tasks in lieu of payment. She calls herself dame in the 'Treatise on Hunting.' The scanty ruins of Sopwell Nunnery may yet be seen about a quarter of a mile north-east of the Abbey of St. Albans, not far from the little river Ver, in which the dame may have fished, and which is yet famous for its trout. The well from which the name was derived is also visible hard by. Of this nunnery the authoress of the 'Boke of St. Albans' was certainly an inmate, and probably, as tradition has handed down, its prioress. Her name does not appear in the list of the prioresses of Sopwell; but there is a gap in their enumeration between 1430, when Matilda Flamstead died, and 1480, when a commission was issued by the abbot of St. Albans (on whom the nunnery was dependent) to Rothebury, the cellarer, and Thomas Ramrugge, the sub-prior, to supersede from her office of prioress Joan Chapell, who was very old and too infirm to discharge her duties. In this space of fifty years upholders of the time-honoured belief may legitimately insert the dame as prioress if they will. The nunnery itself had been founded under the rule of St. Benedict about 1140. The rule of life was very strict, and at first the nuns had been enclosed under lock and key; but this discipline was gradually relaxed, and it is quite conceivable that, without participating in the license and evil-living which rendered notorious many of the religious houses prior to the reformation, the dame and her companions might have allowed themselves a decent liberty, during which field sports suitable to their sex might have alternated with the exercises of devotion. In the well-watered, well-timbered neighbourhood of Sopwell the dame may have found inducements to follow the field-sports which are inseparably connected with her name and the 'Boke of St. Albans.' A century after her time, Mary Queen of Scots displayed the same passionate enthusiasm for hunting and hawking which animated so many high-born ladies during the middle ages. In any case, the dame could solace herself with her treatises among the ruthless succession of battles, treasons, and executions which marked the wars of the Roses, and from which her own kith and kin had not escaped. She had heard, it may be, of the marvellous art which Caxton had been introducing into England at his Westminster Press, 'the almoury at the red pale.' Suddenly she found another of these wonderworking printers settled at her own doors, and made over to him her manuscripts, much to the delectation of posterity.

Such being the shadowy life of Dame Juliana Berners, it is curious that a like fate pursues even her printer. He is only known from Wynkyn de Worde's reprint of 'St. Alban's Chronicle,' the colophon of which states: 'Here endith this present chronicle, compiled in a book and also enprinted by our sometime schoolmaster of St. Alban.' From 1480 to 1486 he issued eight works, the first six of which are in Latin. Towards the end of his life he seems to have grasped the fact that fame waited for the man who should give books in their own tongue to the English. Accordingly his last two books, 'The Boke of St. Albans' and 'St. Alban's Chronicle,' were printed in the vernacular. He printed