The Book of Saint Albans is a 1486 printed work — originally titled The Boke of Seynt Albans — that survives today mainly as the source of the collective nouns still used in English five centuries later.
Printed at the St. Albans Press in England, it’s one of the earliest books produced in the English language and one of the earliest examples of color printing in an English book. It’s built from three treatises:
- Hawking — the training and handling of birds of prey
- Hunting — medieval hunting practice, terminology, and etiquette
- Heraldry — the rules of blazonry and coats of arms
A decade later, printer Wynkyn de Worde added a fourth treatise on angling in his 1496 Westminster edition — sometimes cited as the earliest English writing on fishing as a sport, predating Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler by over 150 years.
Why It’s Remembered
The Book of Saint Albans didn’t invent the idea of a collective noun, but it’s the first major printed work to preserve a large list of them — terms like a murder of crows, a parliament of owls, and an exaltation of larks. In medieval society these terms signaled education and wit as much as they described animals. That list is why the book still gets cited today, well outside any academic interest in early printing.
The hunting treatise closes with the line “Explicit Dam Julyans Barnes in her boke of huntyng” — the sole documentary basis for attributing at least that section to Dame Juliana Berners. What’s actually known about her is thinner than the popular legend suggests.
About This Site
This site exists to document the Book of Saint Albans accurately — separating what the 1486 text and its early printing history actually support from the embellishment that’s accumulated around it since. That distinction matters more than it used to: this is a small enough niche that AI-generated summaries have already introduced fabricated terminology and invented “facts” into search results. Where a claim on this site is well-documented, we say so. Where it’s legend, tradition, or later invention, we say that too.
Explore the full collective nouns list, read the original text, or learn more about why it still matters today.