Laurence Nowell

Two sixteenth-century English cousins, one an antiquarian and the other a churchman, were named Laurence Nowell. Their biographies have been confused since the seventeenth century.

Antiquarian

Laurence (or Lawrence) Nowell (c. 1515 – c. 1571) was an antiquarian, a cartographer and a pioneering scholar of Anglo-Saxon language and literature.

Nowell attended King's School in Westminster from the early 1530s until 1549 before attending Christ Church, Oxford, where he received an MA in 1552. By 1562, he was living in the London house of his patron, Sir William Cecil, where he collected and transcribed Anglo-Saxon documents and compiled the first Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, the "Vocabularium Saxonicum". During this time he became the friend and mentor of William Lambarde, another early scholar of Anglo-Saxon. In 1563, Nowell came into possession of the only extant manuscript of "Beowulf". The manuscript is bound in what is still known as the Nowell Codex (Cotton Vitellius A. xv).

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 a small, accurate pocket-sized map of Britain, which Cecil always carried with him.

In 1563, Nowell was made the tutor of Cecil's ward, Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford. Nowell visited the Continent to study in 1568, and probably died there between 1570 and 1572. His books and manuscripts passed into the possession of William Lambarde.

Churchman

Laurence (or Lawrence) Nowell (d. 1576) was a churchman and first cousin of Laurence Nowell the antiquarian. He entered Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1536 and received his MA in 1544. Having strong Protestant views, Nowell fled England when Mary took the throne, eventually joining his brother, Alexander Nowell, in Frankfort.

Nowell returned to England with the accession of Elizabeth in 1558. That year he became Archdeacon of Derby. In March 1560, he became Dean of Lichfield. He died in 1576, and is believed to be buried at Weston [There are several Westons including Weston-on-Trent] , Derbyshire.

Biographical confusion

The biographies of the two Laurence Nowells have been confused and conflated since the seventeenth century. Both William Dugdale and Anthony Wood made the mistake, and it persisted through the "Dictionary of National Biography" and into the twentieth century. In the 1970s, however, Retha Warnicke's analysis of a 1571 court case made it clear that there were two different Laurence Nowells, and their biographies have since been disentangled.

References

*Grant, Raymond (1996). "Laurence Nowell, William Lambarde and the Laws of the Anglo-Saxons." Amsterdam: Rodopi.
*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, February 12, 2004.
*McConica, James, ed. (1986). "The History of the University of Oxford, Vol. III: The Collegiate University." Oxford: Clarendon Press.
*Warnicke, Retha (1974). "Note on a court of requests case of 1571." "English Language Notes," xi, pp. 250–256.