Thynges very memorable

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.