John Leland and the Anglo-Norman Historian

Summary

John Leland the antiquary died in 1552. The great contributions which he made to learning were in the fields of topography and bibliography. Between about 2533 and 1547 he spent much of his time in travel around England and Wales, equipped with a royal commission to investigate monastic, cathedral and college libraries, just before, during and after the Dissolution of the Monasteries. His journeys resulted in several volumes of notes on the manuscripts he found and also on the landscapes through which he passed. He had begun his working life as a classical scholar and thought of himself as a notable Latin poet, but, apparently with patriotism as his main propelling force, he developed a strong interest in every aspect of his country’s past. He planned a whole series of historical works, of which more will be said later, but in fact all that he published in his lifetime were a few short pieces of a polemical nature. He completed in manuscript a biographica1 dictionary of British writers from the beginnings of history to his own time, the Commentarii de Scriptoribus Britannicis (hereafter Commentarii). His other historical and topographical work remained in note form. It was all finally published in the eighteenth century, when the manuscripts had collected in the Bodleian Library. The material on history and manuscripts is known as the Collectanea and the topographical notes as the Itinerary. Leland’s work on any particular subject will often be divided among these three ‘works’, so that they have to be taken as a single whole.

Leland has usually been regarded as the founder of scientific antiquarian study in Britain but the contrast between his aims and his actual achievement has led to greatly conflicting assessments of him. Some claim that he was overrated, the esteem of his contemporaries being based on his own exaggerated estimate of his abilities. The real importance of his career lies partly in its timing. The short lists which he left of books in one hundred and thirty-seven monastic libraries are a crucial last-minute glimpse of the contents of the libraries just before they were permanently scattered. Also important was the influence which his blueprint for his own works was to have on the next generation of scholars.