Equipped with some sort of letter from King Henry VIII (‘principis diploma’ as he called it), John Leland (c. 1503–52) travelled extensively throughout England from 1533 to approximately 1536 examining the libraries of the universities, the monasteries, and other religious houses, making lists of what he saw. In the heated atmosphere of the 1530s, when Henry VIII was making a definitive break with Rome and establishing himself as the supreme head of the church in England, Leland's patrons no doubt saw the polemical value in the treatises hidden away in the monastic and other libraries. For himself, Leland had other plans. In particular, he envisaged a comprehensive study ‘De uiris illustribus’, that is, a history of men ‘who hathe beene lernid, and who hath writen from tyme to tyme in this reaulme’. Although never fully completed, this work was compiled in two stages; the first (labelled Stage I in my edition) was begun in 1535 and put aside around 1537, after Leland had abandoned his trawls through libraries and turned to a wider set of itineraries, the notes of which were made in English. When Leland returned to De uiris illustribus seriously c. 1543 (Stage II) the monasteries had all been dissolved, and many of the manuscripts containing the works he recorded had been lost or destroyed.

Leland's booklists were recorded in a folio notebook, now Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Top. gen. c. 3, pp. 253–74; pp. 5–66, and were published by Thomas Hearne (1678–1735) as part of what he described as Leland's De rebus Britannicis Collectanea. The first edition appeared in 1715 and was succeeded by a second edition (from which I quote) published posthumously in 1770; this was reprinted in 1774. The booklists, which are found in the fourth volume of the 1770 edition, are in the process of being re-edited in the Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues to which our honorand has been a distinguished contributor. Surprisingly, however, there is no evidence that Leland examined the impressive collections at Syon abbey, and so he does not appear in that volume of the series.