Leland, JOHN, born in London about 1506, was educated at St Paul's, then at Christ's, Cambridge, and All Souls', Oxford. He became chaplain to Henry VIII., who in 1533 commissioned him as 'king's antiquary,' with power to search for records of antiquity in the cathedrals, colleges, abbeys, and priories of England. The next six years he devoted to his tour with unrelenting diligence, and collected 'a whole world of things very memorable,' to the arrangement of which he gave the remainder of his life. His church preferences were the rectories of Pofeling, in the marches of Calais, and Haseley in Oxfordshire, a canonry of King's College (now Christ Church), Oxford, and a prebend of Salisbury. His last five years were darkened by insanity, from which he found relief in death, April 18, 1552. He had laboured in vain with gigantic industry to arrange and digest his vast collection of materials, into which burrowed his successors, Stow, Camden, William Burton, and Dugdale.
Most of his papers are now in the Bodleian and British Museum. Besides his Commentarii de Scriptoribus Britannicis (ed. by Anthony Hall, 2 vols. 1709), his chief remaining works are The Itinerary (ed. by Thomas Hearne, 9 vols. 1710-12) and De Rebus Britannicis Collectanea (ed. by Hearne, 6 vols. 1715). For his life, see the Lives of Leland, Hearne, and Wood, edited by W. Huddesford (2 vols. 1772).