Welsh Journals

JOHN LELAND, WALES, AND EARLY BRITISH HISTORY THE sixteenth century was a particularly crucial phase of that process by which the writings that give us our knowledge of early-mediaeval Wales were preserved and handed down to later generations. The dissolution of the Monasteries led to the destruction of many manuscripts, and caused many more which had been reposing in monastic libraries to be brought into the new limelight of the printing press and scholarly controversy. One of the central participants in this process was the antiquary, John Leland. Although he was by no means alone, and was probably not the most important scholar of the age from the point of view of Welsh history, he deserves to be singled out as one of the first in the field, and because the written results of his work have proved so intractable. John Leland was given a unique royal commission in 1533 to search the libraries of England and Wales (mostly monastic and cathedral libraries) for manuscripts of historical interest. He did this with enthusiasm, sometimes appropriating the manuscripts for the library of King Henry VIII. In the 'New Year's Gift' of 1546, he described how, in the process, he became interested in geography and began to travel more widely and to make notes for a complete description of Britain. No one else at the time had the same opportunities or ranged so widely as a collector. He planned an ambitious series of works but finished very few of them, for between 1546 and 1550 he went mad, and he died in 1552. The only works2 of Leland which he intended for dissemination in their present form are the Assertio and the Commentarii; of these, the Commentarii were published only in 1709 in an uncritical edition which has the effect of obscuring the interesting annotations and corrections in Leland's autograph. The Collectanea and the Itinerary are little more than two vast sets of rough Biographical details are given by T. D. Kendrick, British Antiquity (London, 1950), pp. 45-64; May McKisack, Medieval History in the Tudor Age (Oxford, 1971), pp. 1-25; J. Carley, 'John Leland and the contents of English pre-Dissolution libraries: Glastonbury Abbey', Scriptorium, XL (1986), 107-20. The historical works of John Leland are: Thomas Hearne (ed.), loannis Lelandi Antiquarii de rebus Britannicis Collectanea cum Thomae Hearnii Praefatione Notis et Indice ad Editionem Primam (2nd edn., 6 vols., London, 1770) (henceforward Collectanea); John Leland, Assertio inclytissimi Arturii regis Britanniae (London 1544) (Assertio), also published by Hearne (ed.), Collectanea, V, 17-68; Anthony Hall (ed.), Commentarii de scriptoribus Britannicis, auctore Joanne Lelando (2 vols., Oxford, 1709) (Commentarii); L. T. Smith (ed.), The Itinerary of John Leland in or about the years 1535-1543 (5 vols., London, 1907-10) (The Itinerary), with Vol. III separately titled as The Itinerary in Wales of John Leland in or about the years 1536-1539 (London, 1906). The author is preparing a new edition of the Commentarii.