JOHN LELAND AND THE CONTENTS OF ENGLISH PRE-DISSOLUTION LIBRARIES: THE CAMBRIDGE FRIARS

Abstract

John Leland first came to Cambridge as a student at Christ's College, where he received a B.A. in 1521-22.2 All his life he was to maintain a strong loyalty to Cambridge, whose intellectual life he preferred to that at Oxford and whose delights he celebrated in Latin verse.3 Even as a young man Leland showed an interest in manuscript studies and a desire to track down the literary remains of important writers. It was not until he went to Paris in the late 1 520s, however, that he consciously absorbed the humanist principles of textual criticism, at which time he became an avowed disciple of Guillaume Bude, Jacques Lefevre d'Etaples, Paulo Emilio and Jean Ruel.4 In particular, Francois Du Bois, professor of rhetoric and principal of the College de Tournai in Paris, served as a mentor and lent him unusual and valuable manuscripts.5 Leland returned to England in 1529, and several years later first having secured enough benefices to provide a comfortable income he turned his attention to British libraries. By 1533 he had begun his travels, during the course of which he would examine the contents of a large proportion of the monastic and collegial libraries throughout the kingdom.6 According to his own evidence he received some sort of specific commission (no longer extant) from Henry VIII ťto peruse and diligently to serche al the libraries of monasteries and collegies of this yowre noble reaulme'.7 Elsewhere in his writings he refers to a letter {diploma) which he carried with him from library to library.8 By about 1538, however, his interests seem to have shifted from books alone to antiquities and geographical curiosities in general and his itineraries as such which are quite distinct from his library tours date from this latter period. Leland first came to Cambridge, then, before 1520, and initiated the new phase of his career in 1538 by setting out from his alma mater on the first of his major itineraries.9 His visits to Cambridge in the intervening years may have been numerous; but the actual notes on Cambridge libraries, which concern us here, were almost certainly compiled during the course of a single stay at some point between 1533 and 1538 and by the end of 1538 in any case the Cambridge houses had been officially suppressed and their books fully dispersed.10 Leland saw and