In the 1530s, England was in a state of turbulence, caused by Henry VIII’s break from Rome and dissolution of the monasteries. Leland was sent on a mission by the monarch to save the libraries of these vanishing monasteries. But over nine years (1533-42), he turned the trip into something bigger.
Leland planned to produce the information for a great map of Great Britain. He set himself the task of visiting and describing the entire nation in detail. It was a staggering undertaking, one that ultimately drove him mad.
The journey that best exhibits Leland’s legacy was his 1533 visit to Somerset, Devon and Cornwall.
In this Great British Journey, Nick Crane retraces Leland’s route and tries to discover what impact the dissolution of the monasteries had on the Tudor landscape. Does anything of that landscape remain today? And what was it about this project that cost Leland his sanity?
Who was John Leland?
Born in 1503, John Leland became a Royal Chaplain in 1529 then sub-librarian to Henry VIII. A scholar and priest, he was by instinct a geographer with a fantastic eye for detail.
His journals made him the great recorder of Tudor England: although he feared his words wouldn’t survive, Henry VIII ordered them preserved. And while Leland died without producing his great map of England, the notes he left behind confirmed him as England’s original discoverer, the man who invented field work and whose rigorous methods laid the ground for generations of mapmakers.
So why did he go mad? It’s probable that the magnitude of his task took a huge toll on Leland. And as a religious man, it must have pained him to see the fabric of the church being destroyed. But perhaps it was the loneliness of being so far ahead of his time that finally drove him over the edge.
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