A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country/Berners, (Dame Julyan)

by Mary Matilda Betham

BERNERS, (DAME JULYAN) an English Writer about the Middle of the 15th Century, Daughter of Sir James Berners, of Roding, in Essex, and Sister to Sir Richard, first Lord Berners, was Prioress of the Convent of Sopewell, in Hertfordshire, near St. Albans, where she presided over twelve Nuns of the Benedictine Order.

Being of a noble house, she was allowed the title of Dame, and is celebrated by Hall, Holinshed, and many others, for her uncommon learning, spirit, and majestic beauty. She delighted in masculine exercises, and was so well skilled in them, that she wrote a book under the title of Julyan Barnes her Gentleman's Academy of Hawking, Hunting, Fishing, and Armorie. The coats of arms to the latter treatise were in their proper colours; that on Hunting was a poem of 606 lines; the rest were in prose.

She is said to be the second English female writer, and the first who appeared in print. So popular was her work that it passed through two impressions in the space of five years, and this at the most early period of printing, when books were neither common nor of rapid sale; but the subjects were adapted to the taste and amusements of the age.

The boke of St. Albans, which was the name her work obtained, from being printed there, was first published in a small folio, in 1495, or, as others say, in 1481; and again, in 1486; there was another edition of it in the latter end of queen Elizabeth's reign, 1595. It is now extremely scarce. Dr. John Moore, bishop of Norwich, had it in his collection, and there is another at Cambridge.

Specimens of the Poetry.

Proverbes.

Who that buildeth his house all of salowes.
And pricketh a blind horse over the fallowes,
And suffrith his wife to seek many halowys,
God send him the bliss of everlasting galowis.

She was living in 1460; but there is no account of the time of her death.

Dallaway's Inquiries; Female Worthies; New Annual Register, &c.