John Dennys

John Dennys (died 1609), a poet and fisherman, pioneered Angling poetry in England. His only work The Secrets of Angling was the earliest English poetical treatise on fishing. John Dennys may have been an acquaintance of Shakespeare.

Early life John Dennys was son of Hugh Dennis (died 1559) |group=lower-roman Sir Harris Nicholas reported that he was the younger son of Sir Walter Dennys of Pucklechurch and Agnes Danvers or Davers, and The Secrets of Angling was written a century earlier than believed. Ellacombe claims that Sir Walter and Katherine were his great-grand parents. The author of the article claimed that Ellacombe had the correct genealogy of author John Dennis. The introductions of the 1883 and 1885 The Secrets of Angling editions state that it is believed that John's father was Hugh and his mother was Katherine Trye. Watkins, his biographer, said that Ellacombe's account was "correcting Sir Harris Nicolas's account". John's elder brother Henry, died without having fathered any children. In it he wrote of a brook, River Boyd, formed from streams in his hometown of Pucklechurch, which met downstream with the River Avon:

A didactic pastoral poem in 3 books, totalling 151 verses each of 8 lines, in the style of Virgil's Georgics, it was published in 4 editions until 1652, examples of which are amongst the rarest books in existence. Verses from the book have been quoted in other works, such as Izaak Walton in the first part of the first chapter of his 1653 edition of The Compleat Angler. and had the following children: Henry (born 1594), High Sheriff of Gloucestershire (1629), died on 26 June 1638 and may also have been buried the same day at Pucklechurch. Katherine, born 1599 and baptised 9 April 1599

Death and epitaph He died 30 July 1609 and was buried 7 August 1609 at the ancient Pucklechurch, #tag:ref|The inscription for his son Henry's monument has caused errors in historical records of the Dennys family.

Thomas Westwood wrote the following epitaph for John Dennys: Calm be his sleep in the old aisle of Pucklechurch! or if any sound reach him from the outer world, may it be only the soughing of the sweet south wind, and the ripple of Boyd, that with "crooked winding way" past cliff and meadow, "Its mother Avon runneth soft to seek".