The boke of Saint Albans — Reading Notes

The Fourfold Structure of the Introduction

Blades organizes his preliminary matter into four chapters, each addressing a distinct aspect of the book. The first chapter weighs the evidence for attributing the treatises to Dame Juliana Berners, noting that historians and biographers have a “natural antipathy to anonymous books” and often accept slender proof. The second chapter turns to the typography of the St Albans press, comparing its type and layout with other incunabula. The third chapter surveys the subject-matter—hawking, hunting, and “cote armour”—while the fourth discusses the language and orthography, which Blades calls “quite different from any other printed work of the fifteenth century.” This systematic approach gives the reader a clear framework for understanding the facsimile that follows.

Proverbial Wisdom and Practical Lists

The text itself is a miscellany of instruction and folk observation. A passage on the properties of a good horse lists fifteen qualities drawn from five creatures: three from a man, three from a woman, three from a fox, three from a hare, and three from an ass. The horse should be “boolde prowde and hardy” like a man, “fayre brestid” like a woman, and have “a faire tayle short eris” like a fox. Elsewhere, the reader finds a set of proverbs warning against building a house of willow, pricking a blind horse over fallows, or letting a wife seek many halows—ending with the wish that God send such a builder “the blysse of euerlastyng galowis.” The book also includes a long list of collective nouns for animals and people, from “a Herde of Hertis” to “a Noonpaciens of wyues.”

The Language of the St Albans Press

Blades emphasizes that the orthography of The Boke of Saint Albans is distinctive, sharing features only with the St Albans Chronicle from the same press. The facsimile allows readers to see the original spelling and abbreviations, such as the use of thorn (þ) and the abbreviation for “with” (wiƚƚ). The text also contains passages of verse and rhyme, like the lines on the ages of a dog: “The .v. yere he is good Inough / The .vi. yere he shaƚƚ holde the plough.” These linguistic details, together with the mix of Latin and English phrases (e.g., “Quia indignacion regis vel principis mors est”), make the book a valuable resource for studying the development of English prose and verse in the late fifteenth century.

Readers approaching this facsimile should be prepared for a text that is part manual, part commonplace book. The treatises on hawking and hunting are practical, but they sit alongside moral sayings and lists that seem designed for memorization. Blades’s introduction provides essential context, but the real interest lies in the juxtaposition of instruction and proverb, of Latin tags and English rhyme. The book rewards slow reading, with attention to the spelling, the rhythm of the prose, and the unexpected turns of phrase that mark it as a product of a particular press and a particular moment in English printing.

That rainy afternoon, the Boke of Saint Albans sat heavy in my lap, its woodcut hawks and precise heraldic beasts strangely soothing against the drumming window. I lingered on the market regulations, those tiny marginal notes about pricing and tolls. Later, almost without thinking, I found myself reaching for a quieter volume, Extracts Relating to Mediaeval Markets and Fairs in England — A Reader’s Guide, its pages filled with the same patient, everyday accounting of lives lived. The two books seemed to whisper to one another across the centuries, sharing a common, unhurried breath.