The Early English Antiquaries
Esther A.L. Moir meets the early English antiquaries— from William of Worcester to Sir William Dugdale—pioneers who laid the foundations of an important form of modern historical scholarship. Travelling up and down Great Britain, They kept a careful record of everything they heard and saw, investigating the monuments of the past and describing the landscapes of their own age.
By a curious irony John Leland has become known to posterity as the first and only holder of that proud title King's Antiquary although he never in fact held any such office.1 The result has been not only to obscure the fact that he was essentially a topographical writer, but that he held a central position in that earliest phase of English antiquarian writing which began with William of Worcester’s Itinerary in the late fifteenth century and ended with the publication of Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warwickshire in 1656. For English antiquarian studies may well be said to have begun, not with Leland’s massive Itinerary, but with that long, slim volume now in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge,2 the commonplace book which William of Worcester carried with him on his travels.
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