Henry VIII sent him to see every library in England before they were destroyed. He never wrote the book he promised — his mind gave out first.

Where it sits

Parts I–III · Vol. I, 1907

What kind of text

Written narrative in his own hand, across all three Parts

Counties reached

Northamptonshire, Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, Durham, Leicestershire, Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Cornwall

By way of

Fotheringhay, Northampton, Rockingham, Grimsthorpe, Ancaster, Conisbrough, Doncaster, Pontefract, Tadcaster, York, Beverley, Hull, Scarborough, Bridlington, Durham, Brancepeth, Leicester, Bedford, Reading, Abingdon, Sherborne, Old Sarum, Wilton, Wells, Hayle

Three separate loops: the counties around Northampton, a long run north into Yorkshire, and a detour south-west to Sarum and Wells.

The 1533 commission did not ask Leland for an itinerary. It asked, in his own later account, for “a most gracious commission... to peruse and diligently to search all the libraries of monasteries and colleges of this your noble realm”. The original document does not survive; what is known of it comes from how Leland himself described it to the king, years afterwards. He called himself antiquarius, in the humanist fashion of his day — later biographers called him “the King's Antiquary”, but no royal patent with that title has ever been found.

The eight years that followed overlapped with the dissolution of the English monasteries, 1536–1541. Leland's mission changed shape on the road, from cataloguing to salvage: in 1536 he wrote to Thomas Cromwell that the Germans “perceive our desidiousness, and do send daily young scholars hither” who “spoileth” books and “cutteth them out of libraries”, carrying English books home as trophies. The first book of his notebooks, written in his own hand and set for print, takes him through Northamptonshire — to Fotheringhay, to Rockingham Castle, stately still, though the lodgings inside its walls “be discoverid and faul to ruine” — then north-east to Grimsthorpe, where a marble quarry beside Vauldey Abbey shows him “by the ruines of Vauldey Abbay... that it hath bene a great thyng”.

From there he climbs through Lincolnshire into Yorkshire: Ancaster, Conisbrough, Doncaster, Pontefract, Tadcaster, up to York, where the castle is “of no very great quantite... a 5. ruinus toures in it. The arx is al in ruine.” He goes on to Beverley, Hull, Scarborough, Bridlington, then down to Durham and Brancepeth, and back by way of Bedford. The second book takes him to Reading — where nothing of the Saxon castle remained but a street name, “Castelle-Streat”, “but I could not perceive or clerely lerne wher it stoode” — to the fourteen-arch bridge at Abingdon, and to Sherborne, where the prior promises to take him to “the old librarie”.

The third book takes him to Old Sarum, where he states a cause plainly: “the chaunging of this way was the totale cause of the ruine of Old-Saresbyri and Wiltoun” — the town died because the road went around it. At Wells he finds Thomas Bubwith's library, raised over a cloister with twenty-five windows on each side. And somewhere near South Cadbury he records something nobody else had yet written down in English: the local people “can telle nothing ther but that they have hard say that Arture much resortid to Camalat” — the earliest written link between Cadbury and Camelot.

Where it sits

Parts IV–V · Vol. II, 1908

What kind of text

Part IV: pedigrees, not itinerary. Part V: narrative, the fullest in the whole corpus.

Counties reached

Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, Monmouthshire, Herefordshire

By way of

Oxford, Bicester, Brackley, Banbury, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwick, Alcester, Evesham, Winchcombe, Tewkesbury, Cheltenham, Gloucester, Cirencester, Monmouth, Hereford, Leominster, Worcester, Bristol

One long thread, Oxford to Worcester and Bristol, woven from the stops his own text links, with the distance in miles.

The second volume opens with a Part that is not itinerary at all. Toulmin Smith describes it plainly: it “is not Itinerary, but consists of notes for it, chiefly on men and families”, citing his authorities from family pedigrees. It opens on a fragment about “Sergeant Pygot”, of the time of Henry the Sixth — Leland's usual prose is entirely absent.

Part V, by contrast, is the fullest narrative in his whole corpus — the highest mean words per entry of all eleven Parts. It starts from Oxford, through Bicester and Brackley, to Banbury, then to Stratford-upon-Avon and Warwick. From Alcester and Evesham it radiates in short loops to Winchcombe, Tewkesbury, Pershore and Worcester — he notes the distances precisely, mile by mile, between each stop and the next.

From Gloucester more loops branch off: to Cirencester, to Monmouth, to Bristol, to Hereford. At Hereford it branches again, to Leominster and to Worcester by another road. It is the kind of note he makes constantly — not the landscape, but the exact mileage linking one place to the next — the raw material a complete description of the kingdom could have been built from, had he lived to finish it.

The contrast with Part IV, written in the same volume, is exactly what the numbers show: a list of family names does not read anything like a road described mile by mile. The two Parts sit side by side in the printed edition only because someone bound them that way, long after Leland could still choose the order himself.

Where it sits

Part VI · Vol. III, 1906

What kind of text

Written narrative in his own hand, printed separately as the Welsh notebook

Counties reached

Monmouthshire, Glamorgan, Cardiganshire

By way of

Newport, Cardiff, Castell Coch, Cowbridge, Margam Abbey, Strata Florida Abbey

The south coast, Newport to Cowbridge, then a jump inland to Strata Florida — the link between them is not given directly by the text.

Toulmin Smith dates his passage through Wales to somewhere between 1536 and 1539, caught between two markers: the 1535–36 act uniting Wales with England, and a description of Flintshire's boundary as it stood before an 1541 change. It is the one Part whose chronology can be tied, even loosely, to an outside event.

At Newport he writes only this: “the fairest of the toun is al yn one streate. The toun is yn ruine.” At Castell Coch, near Cardiff, he finds “al yn ruine no bigge thing but high” — standing on a rock of red stone two miles from Llandaff. And of the river Taff he writes something that needs no gloss: the water “cummith so doun from woddy hilles... that the cuntery wer not able to make up the bridges if they were stone, they should be so often broken.”

At Cowbridge he measures the town wall — “a 3. quarters of a mile aboute” — and counts its three gates. And at Strata Florida Abbey, much further north and inland, he describes a ruin with unusual precision: the fratry and infirmary “be now mere ruines”, the cemetery “veri large... meanely waullid with stoone”, and “In it be xxxix. great hue trees.” Thirty-nine trees, counted one by one — the kind of detail only a man actually looking hard at what is in front of him writes down.

The link between the south coast and Strata Florida is not given directly by the text — on the map, the road between them is dashed. It is the kind of gap the whole project treats honestly: where the manuscript does not connect two places, the page does not invent a connection.

Where it sits

Parts VII–VIII · Vol. IV, 1909

What kind of text

Part VII: the only part of this volume with a real claim to narrative. Part VIII: narrative mixed with notes on gentry families.

Counties reached

Shropshire, Northamptonshire, Yorkshire, Kent, Sussex

By way of

Alberbury, Rockingham, Richmond, Faversham, Whitstable, Canterbury, Sandwich, Dover, Folkestone, Hythe, New Romney, Winchelsea, Maidstone

Alberbury and Richmond are isolated stops, far apart from each other; the continuous chain is the Kent coast, Faversham to Winchelsea.

Part VII opens with a sentence that could stand as the whole project's motto: “By Alberbyri Chirch in Shropshir appere the ruines of Fulke Guarine, the noble warriars castel.” FitzWarin was a legendary outlaw knight, an enemy of King John — Leland records the ruin, not the story, and leaves the rest to the reader. Further on, at Rockingham, he returns to a castle he had already described once, in Part I: “Rokingham Castel faullith to ruine” — the same verdict, written a second time, in a different notebook.

At Richmond, in Yorkshire, he finds a castle “nere hand as much yn cumpace as the circuite of the town walle. But now it is in mere ruine.” And on a page torn from the same notebook — the leaf missing exactly at the bottom margin — editors have reconstructed what survives: “they sey that John Wiclif Haereticus was borne at Ipreswel, a poore village a good myle from Richemont.” It is the earliest known claim of Wycliffe's birthplace — preserved on a torn page, half the sentence rebuilt by an editor more than three hundred and fifty years later.

Part VIII takes him along the Kent coast: Faversham, Whitstable, Canterbury — a hub several roads branch from, to Sandwich, to Dover, to Folkestone — then Hythe and Romney. At Dover he finds a Roman ruin: “a ruine of a towr, the which hath bene as a pharos or a mark to shyppes on the se; and therby was a place of Templarys.”

And at Winchelsea he finds a complete story, not just a ruin: the old town “felle to a very soore and manifest ruine, be reason of olde rages of the se”, and the king sent the Bishop of Ely “to vewe a plot to make the new toune of Winchelesey on”. A whole town moved, by royal order, because the sea was swallowing it — the kind of fact Leland records without further comment.

Where it sits

Parts IX–XI · Vol. V, 1910

What kind of text

Part IX: notes, with leaves missing from the original manuscript itself. Part X: the last real narrative, unfinished. Part XI: Stow's copy only.

Counties reached

Somerset, Oxfordshire, Dorset, Wiltshire, Northumberland

By way of

Keynsham, Pensford, Oxford, Shaftesbury, Mere, Gillingham, Newcastle upon Tyne, Little Haseley, Dorchester-on-Thames

The route breaks into pieces: a few stops linked near Oxford, then the thread that leads, certainly, to the last sentence.

The fifth volume opens with an editorial confession: the original manuscript of Part IX “is evidently not in its original state, leaves 7 to 31 inclusive are wanting.” The very volume that describes Leland's notebooks is itself incomplete. What survives is a list of scattered notes with no thread: the stone bridge at Abingdon, Bolingbroke Castle in Lincolnshire, a painting of the Mowbray family at Newburgh Priory, Yorkshire.

Part X is the last real narrative in the whole corpus — and the shortest. It takes him from Oxfordshire west and south, through Keynsham and Pensford, near Bristol, then towards Shaftesbury. There he states plainly why the town fell: “the chapiter howse set up by Alfredus, Kynge of the West-Saxons, in knoledge that he repayred Schaftesberye, dystroyed by the Danes.”

The last sentence he ever wrote in this notebook reads: “From Sheftesbyri towarde Myre I passid a 2. mils by woody grounde, and ther I passyd ovar a broke that ran downe on the lifte hand toward Stowre, and so goynge thoruge a peace of Gillingham Forest I passid over a nother broke.” And then it stops. Thomas Hearne, the 1710 editor, gives the whole story in one line: “[Blank in MS.]” Nothing else in Leland's own hand follows in this Part. The build check for this page searched the source file itself and confirmed it: after that sentence, his text really does stop.

Part XI, the last one printed, is no longer his at all. The original manuscript is lost; what survives comes only through the copy John Stow made in 1576, forty years later, with mistakes of his own layered over Leland's. It opens on a bare list of names: the bishops of Dorchester, from Birinus onward, with no description at all. Further on, scattered, is a list of Newcastle's gates and towers — “From Pandon gate to Pilgrime gate 15. towres” — and, near the end, one last trace of real prose, about a goldsmith's house at Little Haseley, Oxfordshire. Then the book ends. He never got to put it in order.