Laurence (or Lawrence) Nowell (1530 – c.1570) was an English antiquarian, cartographer and pioneering scholar of Anglo-Saxon language and literature.

Life

Laurence Nowell was born around 1530 in

Whalley, Lancashire Whalley is a large village and civil parish in the Ribble Valley on the banks of the River Calder in Lancashire, England. It is overlooked by Whalley Nab, a large wooded hill over the river from the village. The population of the civil parish ...

, the second son of Alexander Nowell of Read Hall and Grace Catterall of

Great Mitton Great Mitton is a village and a civil parish in the Ribble Valley, Lancashire, England. It is separated from the civil parish of Little Mitton by the River Ribble, both lie about three miles from the town of Clitheroe. The combined population o ...

, Lancashire. He may have started school at

Whalley Abbey Whalley Abbey is a former Cistercian abbey in Whalley, Lancashire, England. After the dissolution of the monasteries, the abbey was largely demolished and a country house was built on the site. In the 20th century the house was modifi ...

and sometime later may have attended

Westminster School (God Gives the Increase) , established = Earliest records date from the 14th century, refounded in 1560 , type = Public school Independent day and boarding school , religion = Church of England , head_label = Hea ...

, where his cousin Alexander Nowell was a master from 1543 on, until in 1549 he attended Christ Church, Oxford, where he received an M.A. in 1552. He travelled to Paris, in 1553, then to Rouen, Antwerp, Louvain, Geneva, Venice, Padua and Rome by 1557/58. Another round of extensive travelling ensued, this time around England, Ireland and perhaps Wales, in the company of William Lambarde, during and/or after which he gathered information on Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and English place-names. By 1563, he was living in the London house of his patron, Sir William Cecil. Nowell had been made the tutor of Cecil's ward, Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford. Nowell devoted much effort in the 1560s to a large-scale atlas of Anglo-Saxon Britain, though he never completed the work. For Cecil, he made the first accurate cartographic survey of the east coast of Ireland, as well as presenting him, in 1563/64, with a small, accurate pocket-sized map of Britain, entitled ''A general description of England and Ireland with the costes adioyning'' which Cecil supposedly always carried with him. Nowell also collected and transcribed Anglo-Saxon documents and compiled the first Anglo-Saxon dictionary, the ''Vocabularium Saxonicum''. In 1563, he came into possession of the only extant manuscript of '' Beowulf''. The manuscript is bound in what is still known as the

Nowell Codex The Nowell Codex is the second of two manuscripts comprising the bound volume Cotton MS Vitellius A XV, one of the four major Anglo-Saxon poetic manuscripts. It is most famous as the manuscript containing the unique copy of the epic poem '' Beo ...

(

Cotton Cotton is a soft, fluffy staple fiber that grows in a boll, or protective case, around the seeds of the cotton plants of the genus '' Gossypium'' in the mallow family Malvaceae. The fiber is almost pure cellulose, and can contain minor pe ...

Vitellius A. xv). He also studied the

Exeter Book The Exeter Book, also known as the Codex Exoniensis or Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3501, is a large codex of Old English poetry, believed to have been produced in the late tenth century AD. It is one of the four major manuscripts of Old Englis ...

, annotating folios 9r and 10r amongst others. In 1568 Lambarde, with Nowell's encouragement, published a collection of

Anglo-Saxon law Anglo-Saxon law (Old English ''ǣ'', later ''lagu'' "law"; dōm "decree, judgment") is a body of written rules and customs that were in place during the Anglo-Saxon period in England, before the Norman conquest. This body of law, along with early ...

s, ''Archaionomia'', which was printed by John Day. In the introduction he acknowledges Nowell's contribution. This publication included a woodcut map depicting the seven kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England, which is thought to be the first map of any sort ("Lambardes map") to have been designed, printed and published in England, and which is very likely to have been the work of Laurence Nowell. Nowell, probably realising that he was not going to be given the preferment he sought from Cecil, decided to visit the Continent to study (and possibly to become a diplomat) in 1568, and died there between 1570 and 1572. His books and manuscripts passed into the possession of William Lambarde. Shannon makes the claim that Nowell had "a butterfly mind", and fell into the scholar's trap of rarely finishing a project or publishing anything. Despite this, he also makes the claim that " Nowell was a pioneer in the Anglo-Saxon language, in place-name studies, and in map-making, and that he can be claimed with justification to have single-handedly invented the idea of

historical cartography The history of cartography refers to the development and consequences of cartography, or mapmaking technology, throughout human history. Maps have been one of the most important human inventions for millennia, allowing humans to explain and navig ...

Identification

Two 16th-century English cousins, one an antiquarian and

the other In phenomenology, the terms the Other and the Constitutive Other identify the other human being, in their differences from the Self, as being a cumulative, constituting factor in the self-image of a person; as acknowledgement of being real; h ...

a churchman, were named Laurence Nowell. Their biographies were confused by Anthony Wood in his ''Historia et antiquitates Universitatis Oxoniensis'' (1674) and ''Athenae Oxonienses'' (1691), and the error persisted through later studies, including the '' Dictionary of National Biography'' (1895), and into the twentieth century. In 1974, however,

Retha Warnicke Retha Marvine Warnicke (born 1939) is an American historian and Professor of History at Arizona State University. Career Warnicke graduated with a BA from Indiana University, magna cum laude, in 1961. She then moved on to Harvard University, wh ...

's analysis of a 1571 court case made it clear that there were two different Laurence Nowells, and their biographies have since been partially disentangled. A Laurence Nowell appointed master of Sutton Coldfield grammar school in 1546 was probably (but not certainly) the churchman; while a Laurence Nowell who sat in parliament for the borough of Knaresborough in 1559 has been identified, but again without any certain evidence, as the antiquary.Harris 2022, p. 234n.

References

Sources

* * * * * * * *Hill, David (2004). "Laurence Nowell, Cartographer, Linguist, Archivist and Spy, and his Anglo-Saxon Atlas of 1563." Paper read before the Society of Antiquaries of London, 12 February 2004. * * * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Nowell, Laurence 1510s births 1570s deaths English philologists English cartographers Anglo-Saxon studies scholars Year of birth unknown 16th-century English educators