Itinerary

Written in the 1530s and 1540s, Leland's Itinerary records what its author saw on his travels through England during the reign of Henry VIII. Its eyewitness notes describe hundreds of towns and villages, along with castles, monasteries and the manor houses of the landed gentry. Leland was a learned man of his age, and his observations remain a major source for English local history.

The work never reached a finished form. Leland lost his sanity before he could arrange his notes into an orderly account of his journeys, leaving a disordered mass of material. Some of it is in Latin and some in vigorous Tudor English. Later antiquaries used, damaged and in some cases lost parts of these papers, and the text was not printed until the eighteenth century.

John Chandler's modern English version, first published in 1993 and long out of print, is based on Lucy Toulmin Smith's standard edition of 1906 to 1910. Chandler identified the place and personal names in the text and regrouped its topographical material under the historic counties of England. The book includes maps and a detailed introduction.

This new edition corrects the text, adds passages on Leland's travels in Wales, revises the introduction and sets out a reliable chronology for the surviving accounts of five journeys he made between 1538 and 1544. Historians will continue to quote Leland's original wording, but this modern rendering offers general readers a clear and engaging look at the towns and countryside of England nearly five hundred years ago.