Jonathan Sumption

Thynges very memorable

John Leland, who died in 1552, lived less than 50 years and was mad for the last five of them.

John Leland, who died in 1552, lived less than 50 years and was mad for the last five of them. Today he is one of the forgotten worthies of 16th-century England. An enormous edition of his major prose work may therefore seem an eccentric publishing choice. Yet there are many reasons why we should remember this gentle, melancholy and rather obsessive scholar from another age.

Leland lived at a time when England was changing faster than it had ever done before. Henry VIII had broken with Rome. An aggressive protestantism had achieved a growing influence, and was soon to take possession of the English Church. The monasteries and friaries which had dominated the intellectual life of medieval England were being closed down and their magnificent buildings redeveloped, sold for building materials or simply abandoned to become the romantic ruins of another age. An ambitious new aristocracy was building its fortunes on the hazards of royal favour and the monasteries’ confiscated riches. Changing tastes, internal migration and new patterns of economic enterprise were altering the country’s physical appearance beyond recognition.

The European Renaissance defined itself mainly by its self-confident dismissal of the millenium that separated it from classical Rome, and Leland routinely mouthed the prejudices of his age. He deplored the corruption of late medieval monasticism and was perfectly capable of referring to the ‘gross barbarity’ of the age of Chaucer, Langland and Gower. Yet, more than any other scholar of his time, he also knew how much the civilisation of medieval England had contributed to its modern identity, and did his best to record it at a time when it was rapidly passing from the memory of men.

Like most of Henry VIII’s ablest servants, Leland was a protégé of that great talent-spotter, Cardinal Wolsey.

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