Although John Leland was never officially made "King's Antiquary," as some have claimed, he is nevertheless the founder of modern antiquarian studies in England and was acknowledged as such by his sixteenth-century successors John Bale, William Camden, and William Lambarde. His surviving papers provide the single most important source of information about the contents of the dissolved English monasteries and stand as a prototype for the various county histories that subsequently appeared. Moreover, Leland's view of the term antiquarius, with which he proudly distinguished himself, was much more general than modern usage would suggest. He saw himself as a humanist scholar in the widest sense: a judicious editor of texts, a careful historian of the Arthurian legend, and a connoisseur of bonae litterae, whose excellence he celebrated in his own well-turned verses in purest classical meters.

Most information about Leland's early life comes from his poetry. He was...