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 year a commission was granted him under the broad seal directing him to make a search for English antiquities in the libraries of all cathedrals, abbeys, priories, and colleges, and all places where records, writings, and secrets of antiquity were deposited. In 1532 he had been returned as an absentee from his rectory at Pepeling (ib. v. No. 711), and by a special dispensation, 12 July 1536, he was relieved of the obligation of residence, and was allowed to keep a curate there. Although he does not claim to have spent more than six years (1536–42) in his antiquarian tour through England, he seems to have been mainly occupied in the expedition from 1534 to 1543. He intended his collections to be the basis of a great work on the ‘History and Antiquities of this Nation.’ According to his own account he spared himself neither labour nor cost. He claims to have visited almost every bay, river, lake, mountain, valley, moor, heath, wood, city, castle, manor-house, monastery, and college in the land. And not only did he note the present aspect of the places visited, but he investigated and described all Roman, Saxon, or Danish remains of which he could obtain knowledge, and carefully examined very many coins and their inscriptions. As became a personal adherent of the king, he championed the new religious establishment. He was at York in June 1534, when Sir George Lawson, treasurer of Berwick, informed Cromwell that he and Leland paid a visit to York minster; noting on a tablet on the wall a statement that one of Henry VIII's predecessors ‘took this kingdom of the Pope by tribute to hold of the Church of Rome,’ they rased the offending words ‘out of the tablet’ (ib. vii. App. 23). Bale shared Leland's antiquarian zeal and protestant opinions, and when Bale was imprisoned ‘for his preaching’ in January 1537, Leland wrote on his behalf to Cromwell, and emphasised his learning, judgment, and modesty (ib. XII. i. 230;, Orig. Lett. 3rd ser. iii. 154).

The havoc made among the monastic manuscripts at the dissolution of the monasteries caused Leland infinite distress, and he entreated Cromwell (16 July 1536) to extend his commission so as to enable him to collect the manuscripts for the king's library. ‘It would be a great profit to students and honour to this realm,’ he wrote: ‘whereas now the Germans, perceiving our desidiousness and negligence, do send daily young scholars hither that spoileth them and cutteth them out of libraries, returning home and putting them abroad as monuments of their own country.’ Leland's desire was only in part gratified, but he despatched some valuable manuscripts to London in 1537, the chief of which came from St. Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury (De Script. Brit. p. 299). After Leland's tour was finally concluded, he presented in 1545 an address to Henry VIII, entitled ‘A New Year's Gift,’ in which he briefly described the manner and aims of his researches. He had by that date prepared an account of early English writers, but he hoped to draw up within a year a full description or topography of England, with a map engraved in silver or brass; a work on the antiquities or civil history of the British Isles in fifty books; a survey of the islands adjoining Britain, including the Isle of Wight, Anglesey, and Isle of Man, in six books; and an account of the nobility in three. He also designed an account of Henry's palaces, in imitation of Procopius, who is said to have described the palaces of the emperor Justinian.

But the first work that he completed after his return home was a manuscript treatise dedicated to Henry VIII, and entitled ‘Antiphilarchia,’ in which he claimed to defend the king's supreme dignity in church matters, ‘closely leaning to the strong pillar of Holy Scripture against the whole college of the Romanists.’ The immediate object of his attack was the ‘Hierarchiæ Ecclesiasticæ Assertio’ of Albertus Pighius (Cologne, 1538, fol.) (Newe Yeare's Gifte, sig. F).

Leland soon applied to Archbishop Cranmer, who had already shown some interest in his labours, for church preferment. On 3 April 1542, accordingly, he was presented to the rectory of Haseley, Oxfordshire, and he held a canonry at King's College, Oxford, until 1545, when that institution was converted into Christ Church. He was also prebendary of East and West Knoll or Knoyle in the cathedral of Salisbury, but in his later years he spent most of his time in his house in the parish of St. Michael le Querne in London, where he occupied himself in arranging his notes. He wrote to a friend at Louvain to procure him as an assistant ‘a forward young man about the age of xx years, learned in the Latin tongue, and able sine cortice nare in Greek.’ He seems to have involved himself in some literary quarrel with Richard Croke [q. v.], whom he denounced as a slanderer (Collectanea, v. 161;, Cranmer, iii. 738). In 1544, according to Craig's ‘Scotland's Sovereignty asserted,’ p. 9, Leland drew up the form of the declaration of war made by Henry VIII against the Scots. At length his antiquarian studies overtaxed his brain, and he became incurably insane. On 21 March 1550 the privy council gave him into the custody of his brother, John Le-