Leland, John

John Leland, Leland also spelled Leyland, (born c. 1506, London—died April 18, 1552, London), chaplain and librarian to King Henry VIII. He was the earliest of a notable group of English antiquarians.

Leland was educated at St. Paul’s School and Christ’s College, Cambridge (B.A., 1522), later studying at All Souls’ College, Oxford, and in Paris. He took holy orders and by 1530 was chaplain and librarian to Henry VIII; the special position of king’s antiquary was created for him in 1533, and he was authorized to search cathedral and monastic libraries for manuscripts of historical interest. Probably from 1534 and certainly from 1536 to 1542 he was engaged on an antiquarian tour of England and Wales. He supported Henry VIII’s church policy (though the havoc that resulted among the monastic manuscripts at the dissolution of the monasteries caused him great distress), and his loyalty was rewarded with his presentation to the rectory of Haseley in Oxfordshire, a canonry at King’s College (afterward Christ Church), Oxford, and a prebend at Salisbury. But he resided mainly in London, where he was certified insane in March 1550. He did not regain his reason before he died.

At the conclusion of his tour of England and Wales, Leland presented to the king a plan of his proposed works, a volume later edited as The Laboryouse Journey and Serche of J. Leylande for Englandes Antiquities, Given of Hym as a Newe Yeares Gyfte to Kinge Henry the VIII (1549). He intended to write a book (“History and Antiquities of the Nation”) that would provide a topographical account of the British Isles and the adjacent islands, and to add a description of the nobility and of the royal palaces. Illness and death intervened, however, before these works were prepared. After passing through various hands, the bulk of Leland’s manuscripts—including his important five-volume Collectanea, with notes on antiquities, catalogs of manuscripts in monastic libraries, and Leland’s account of British writers—was deposited (1632) in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. They had in the meantime been freely drawn upon by many other antiquarians, notably by John Bale (who edited the Newe Yeares Gyfte).