¹ On this topic see J. Leland, De uiris illustribus: On Famous Men, ed. and trans. J. P. Carley, with the assistance of C. Brett (Toronto, 2010), pp. li–c.

² J. Leland, De rebus Britannicis collectanea, ed. T. Hearne, 6 vols., 2nd ed. (London, 1774) [hereafter Collectanea].

³ See The Itinerary of John Leland the Antiquary, ed. T. Hearne, 9 vols., 3rd ed. (Oxford, 1768–9); The Itinerary of John Leland in or about the Years 1535–1543, ed. L. Toulmin Smith, 5 vols (London, 1906–10). On the state of the remains see Harris, O., ‘“Motheaten, mouldye, and rotten”: the Early Custodian History and Dissemination of John Leland’s Manuscript Remains’, Bodleian Lib. Record 18 (2005), 460–501Google Scholar. On the sequence of the itineraries, see most recently the introduction to John Leland. Itinerary. A Version in Modern English, ed. J. Chandler (Gloucester, GL, 2022), pp. xliii–xlix.

⁴ On his plans for the notes see De uiris illustribus, ed. Carley, pp. xxx–xxxiii.

⁵ Ibid. p. lxiv, n. 211. For another example, see ibid. p. lviii, n. 176.

⁶ I am now working on a commentary volume to the text.

⁷ On pp. c–ciii and clvii–clviii of my introduction to De uiris illustribus, I outline the ways in which I am able to distinguish between the two stages; see also Appendix 2.

⁸ For the remainder of this paper Otho A. xii refers only to the Vita Ælfredi regis rather than the whole manuscript.

⁹ From the perspective of Archbishop Matthew Parker (1504–1575) what was particularly significant as he set about consolidating church and state in his Elizabethan Settlement was the fact that the opening salutation contained in Otho A. xii described Alfred as rector of all Christians in the island of Britain, but rex only of the Anglo-Saxons (‘Domino meo venterabili piismoque omnium Britannie insulae christianorum rectori Ælfred Anglorum Saxonum regi’). This ties in with the position that Henry VIII maintained after the break with Rome in 1534 and his re-interpretation of the title Fidei Defensor bestowed on him in 1521 by Pope Leo X. In this context it remains an unresolved mystery why Leland never quotes the salutation.

¹⁰ Keynes, S., ‘On the Authenticity of Asser’s Life of King Alfred’, JEH 47 (1996), 529–551 Google Scholar.

¹¹ Collectanea IV, 13. This is the Vita secunda Sancti Neoti (BHL 6052), pr. in Acta sanctorum ordinis Sancti Benedicti, ed. L. d’Achery and J. Mabillon, 9 vols, (Paris, 1733–38), IV.2 337–49. Leland probably also saw London, British Library, MS Add. 38130, which contains a copy of the Vita prima Sancti Neoti (ed. Lapidge in The Annals of St Neots with Vita prima Sancti Neoti, ed. D. Dumville and M. Lapidge, AS Chronicle: a Collaborative Edition 17 (Cambridge, 1985), 111–142).

¹² His extracts are found in Collectanea III, 214–19. The text was edited by Dumville in Annals of St Neots, ed. Dumville and Lapidge, pp. 1–107. In the words of Dumville, the skill of the Compiler of the Annals, which covered the period from 60 BC to AD 914, ‘lay in the selection and blending of items from different texts to produce an Anglo-Norman protohistory with a slant towards the visionary and the East Anglian’, (p. lxiv).

¹³ ‘From a book of annals by an unknown author, who was nevertheless a member of the household of King Alfred, patron of all writers’ (Collectanea III, 214).

¹⁴ The Life of St Neot itself (De uiris illustribus, ed. Carley, §113) was a later addition.

¹⁵ ‘The history by a certain scribe who was very intimate with Alfred and wrote his deeds’ (De uiris illustribus, ed. Carley, p. 248; later deleted).

¹⁶ ‘Nos igitur, quoniam apud Fanum Neoti [coenobium Isodunensis prouinciae in ripa Iscae fluminis situm] in uetus exemplar nuper incidimus’ (De uiris illustribus, ed. Carley, pp. 248–48).

¹⁷ ‘The scribe who wrote the Alfred’s history in a most diligent fashion made not even the slightest mention of Æthelweard’ (De uiris illustribus, ed. Carley, pp. 250–51).

¹⁸ ‘whom I have mentioned twice in the above’ (De uiris illustribus, ed. Carley, pp. 252–53). He referred to the scribe elsewhere. In 1533, for example, he had seen and taken possession of a copy of Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum, now London, British Library, MS Arundel 48, which he annotated as well as taking extracts: see Collectanea III, 289–306. In the extracts he observed that in book five there were materials ‘ex histor[i]a Scribae Alfredi desumpta’ (Collectanea III, 297). Specifically he would point out that ‘Awldre castrum, alias Apuldran, in historia, a quodam Alfredi regis familiari scripta’ (Collectanea III, 298). This is taken from the Annals of St Neots, under 892 (ed. Dumville, p. 95).

¹⁹ ‘which I have also heard from my Lord Alfred, the truthful king of the Anglo-Saxons, who has often said it to me’ (De uiris illustribus, ed. Carley, pp. 252–53). For Leland’s extract from the Annals including this statement see Collectanea III, 214. His source was Annals of St Neots, ed. Dumville, pp. 47–8.

²⁰ ‘It seemed best to give the author the not unsuitable name of “scribe”, since his own name appears nowhere in the single manuscript which I had’ (De uiris illustribus, ed. Carley, pp. 252–53).

²¹ The Libraries of the Cistercians, Gilbertines and Premonstratensians, ed. D. N. Bell (London, 1992), Z10. 1–2.

²² ‘From the chronicle of Jervaulx, by an unknown author. He brought the work up to the time of Richard I’ (Collectanea IV, 44).

²³ Historiae Anglicanae scriptores X, ed. R. Twysden (London, 1652), cols. 721–1284.

²⁴ ‘From the chronicle of Jervaulx, which begins with the arrival in Britain of Augustine, apostle to the English’ (Collectanea I, 209–20). In ‘Two Lives of St. Ethelbert, king and martyr’, EHR 32 (1917), 214–44, M. R. James mistakenly stated that the manuscript derived from Rievaulx Abbey (p. 216, n. 7). John Bale would attribute the text to John Brompton when he saw it in the library of Peter Osborne (d. 1592) (Index Britanniae scriptorum. John Bale’s Index of British and Other Writers, ed. R. L. Poole and M. Bateson, repr. with introduction by C. Brett and J. P. Carley (Cambridge 1990), p. 185). Osborne acquired a number of Leland’s manuscripts after the latter’s death, and from Osborne it went to Parker: see J. P. Carley, ‘“Many Good Autors”: Two of John Leland’s Manuscripts and the Cambridge Connexion’, Trans. of the Cambridge Bibliographical Soc. 15.3 (2014), 27–56, at 34, n. 28.

²⁵ Collectanea I, 210.

²⁶ The copy of Gerald’s Life contained in London, BL, MS Cotton Vitellius E. vii (which would be subsequently badly damaged in the Cotton fire of 1731) was transcribed by William Dugdale and sent to the Bollandists, who published it within the body of the Fitzhugh Chronicle without any attribution to Gerald. The text was subsequently edited by J. S. Brewer in Giraldi Cambrensis opera, RS 21, 8 vols. (London, 1863), III, 407–30, and then by James in ‘Two Lives of St. Ethelbert’, pp. 222–36. Leland saw a copy of the Life at Hereford and took excerpts from it, including the citation of Asser: ‘Unde et huic nostrae paginae quod Asser historicus, verax relator gestorum regis Alfredi, de hac generatione perversa conscripsit eisdem interserere verbis non indignum reputavi’ (Leland’s Itinerary, ed. Toulmin Smith, V, 185–7 at 187; James, ‘Two Lives’, p. 231). In ‘Two Lives’ James points out that Gerald’s source, apart from the citation from Asser, is the Life by Osbert of Clare (p. 218). Leland later saw a copy of Osbert’s Life at Hereford, from which he took brief notes (Leland’s Itinerary, ed. Toulmin Smith, V, 187–8).

²⁷ In Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources (Harmondsworth, 1983), Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge come to the tentative conclusion that Asser never wrote such a passage as the one found in Gerald’s Vita (pp. 57–8). More recently, however, in ‘Un-Editing Alfred: Rethinking Modern Editions of Pre-modern Texts from a Post-modern Sensibility’ (unpubl. PhD dissertation, Univ. Washington, 2016), Christopher J. Martin argues that ‘the allusion in the Vita ultimately must be seen to attest to a lost tradition for the historical writings linked to Asser. The fact that this allusion arises out of Asser’s homeland in Wales is also suggestive’ (pp. 129–30). That Gerald cites Asser may, according to Rebecca Thomas, provide evidence that his writings were known in Wales in the twelfth century: see her ‘The Vita Alcuini, Asser and Scholarly Service at the Court of Alfred the Great’, EHR 134 (2019), 1–24, at 2 and n. 7). From our perspective the most significant point is that even after he obtained Otho A. xii, Leland did not try to explain why these episodes from the Life of Æthelberht do not appear in Asser’s Vita Ælfredi regis.

²⁸ William of Malmesbury: Gesta Pontificum Anglorum / ‘The History of the English Bishops’, I: Text and Translation, ed. and trans. M. Winterbottom with R. M. Thomson (Oxford, 2007), ii, 80–1 (p. 278); quoted in Collectanea III, 250: ‘Assero ex S. Dewi evocatus non usquequaque contemnendae scientiae fuit, qui librum Boetii de consolatione philosophiae planioribus verbis elucidavit, illis diebus labore necessario, nostris ridiculo’. See also William’s Gesta regum Anglorum, which made the same statement (William of Malmesbury: Gesta Regum Anglorum / ‘The history of the English Kings’ I, ed. and trans. R. A. B. Mynors with R. M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom, 2 vols (Oxford, 1998), II, 122–4 (p. 190).

²⁹ Collectanea II, 214.

³⁰ ‘By these few facts on Asser which I have brought out of the dense shadows of antiquity into the light, I greatly desire (if my talent permits) to make him immortal’ (De uiris illustribus, ed. Carley, pp. 256–57).

³¹ Index Britanniae scriptorum, p. 482: ‘Vita Grimbaldi, li. “Vrbs Morinorum quondam ampla’”. See also Index Britanniae scriptorum, p. 98, where Bale attributes it to Goscelin of Saint-Bertin (i.e‥ Goscelin of Canterbury). Leland, on the other hand, stated he did not know the name of the author.

³² De uiris illustribus, § 119, lines 20–25.

³³ See also the relevant passage in his excerpts from the Life: ‘Alfredus rex consilio Eldredi archiepiscopi Cant. oratores ad monaster: S. Bertini de accersendo Grimbaldo misit, inter quos & Joannes presbyter & Asserus, viri eruditissimi & vivacissimi ingenii, praecellebant. Venit Grimbaldus in Angliam anno D. 885’ (In consultation with Æthelred, the archbishop of Canterbury, King Alfred sent envoys, among whom John the priest and Asser, men most learned and vigorous of character excelled, to the monastery of Saint-Bertin to fetch Grimbald. Grimbald came to England in the year of our Lord 885), Collectanea I, 18.

³⁴ ‘From an old but dubious book by an uncertain author on Cambridge’s past’ … ‘John of St Davids, a most learned man, was called by King Alfred from the monastery of St Davids in Wales to Oxford to profess good letters’ (Leland’s Itinerary, ed. Toulmin Smith, II, 166–7). On the Historiola de antiquitate et origine almae et immaculatae Universitatis Cantebrigiae ascribed to Nicholas Cantilupe by Bale, see Carley, ‘Two of John Leland’s Manuscripts’, p. 33. A copy survives as Cambridge University Library, University Archives, Collect. Admin. 9. In the commentary to his Cygnea cantio (ed. Hearne, p. 68) Leland is especially damning about the Historiola: ‘centum sunt ibi praeterea ejusdem farinae fabulae. Profecto nihil legi unquam vanius, sed neque stultius, aut stupidius’ (in it there are as well a hundred fables of the same sort. Truly I have never read anything more empty, more foolish or more stupid). Among Leland’s unfinished projects was a book on the history of the universities. For Oxford at least one of his principal sources was to be the now lost De antiquitate academiarum Britannicarum by John Rous (c. 1420–1492), which he had seen probably in 1533 and from which he had taken extracts, on which see Leland’s Itinerary, ed. Toulmin Smith, II, 151–54 and 167–8. For Leland’s entry on Rous see De uiris illustribus, § 585. In the end he did not entirely accept Rous’s testimony either, as he makes clear in his commentary on the Cygnea cantio (ed. Hearne, p. 80): ‘Rossus Verovicanus, vir majoris longe diligentiae quam judicii’.

³⁵ See Liber monasterii de Hyda (c. 1380), ed. E. Edwards, RS 45 (London, 1866), 1.41. In his ‘King Arthur at Oxbridge: Nicholas Cantelupe, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and Cambridge’s Arthurian Foundation Myth’, MÆ 72.1 (2003), 63–81, at 66–67, Ad Putter provides text and translation: ‘In the year of our Lord’s incarnation 886, in the second year of St Grimbald’s coming to England, the University of Oxford was begun, the first among the regent masters and those reading in theology being St Neot, who excelled both as abbot and as doctor of theology; and St Grimbald, the most eminent professor of the sweetest beauty of sacred Scripture. In grammar and in rhetoric Asser was regent master, a priest and monk and a most erudite man in the literary art; and John, a monk of the church of St Davids, read in dialectic, music, and arithmetic; in geometry and astronomy the teacher was John, a monk and colleague of St Grimbald, a man of most astute intelligence and amongst the most learned; and the most glorious and invincible King Alfred presided, the memory of whom will be relished, like honey, by both clerics and ordinary people, as will the memory of his entire reign’.

³⁶ In the contemporary transcript used by Parker for his 1574 edition of Asser, now Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 100/1, the title is given as Ælfredi res gestae auctore Asser. In the printed text the title appears as Ælfredi regis res gestae, Asser’s name having been dropped. In the preface to the print, however, Parker observes: ‘Ælfredi regis amplissimi (qui olim toti fere Britanniae praefuit) historiam, tibi (humanissime lector) exhibemus, a Iohanne Assero [italics mine] Antistite Shyreburnensi (qui illi quondam a sacris fuit) Latinis literis luculenter expressam’ (sig. Aii^r).

³⁷ The facsimile was made by James Hill (1697–1727), the antiquary employed by Francis Wise (1695–1767) for his 1722 edition which was based for the most part on Hill’s collations. According to Humfrey Wanley (1672–1726), whom Wise consulted, Otho A. xii was written in several hands, the oldest of which resembled that of a charter of Æthelred the Unready dated to 1001. In Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources, pp. 223–5, Keynes and Lapidge point out that the hierarchy of texts suggested by the facsimile is perfect for early eleventh century.

³⁸ Index Britanniae scriptorum, pp. 34–5.

³⁹ See Gallagher, R., ‘Asser and the Writing of West Saxon Charters’, EHR 136 (2021), 773–808 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for more details and other medieval writers possibly familiar with the Vita: ‘The only attested medieval copy of the Life, entirely destroyed by fire in 1731, appears from an early eighteenth-century facsimile to have been produced in England around the year 1000. At about the same time, Byrhtferth, a monk at Ramsey Abbey in the east of England, quoted extensively from the text, while the anonymous author of the mid-eleventh-century Encomium Emmae reginae, who was originally from St-Bertin, also seems to have been familiar with it. In the twelfth century, both John of Worcester and an anonymous author at Bury St Edmunds quoted the Life, and Gerald of Wales, while probably based at Hereford, at least knew of the reputation of Asser as the biographer of Alfred. In addition, recent evidence for knowledge of the Life by the author of the Welsh poem Armes Prydein Vawr is the strongest hint yet that some form of the biography was known in Wales in the tenth century’ (pp. 774–5).

⁴⁰ Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources, p. 223.

⁴¹ De uiris illustribus, ed. Carley, p. lxxi.

⁴² Ibid. p. lxxiii.

⁴³ Ibid. p. lxxxviii.

⁴⁴ Leland’s annotated copy survives as Worcester Cathedral Library G. E. 1. On the title page he has written: ‘Hunc librum non alio nomine comparaui mihi quam ut, iubente principe meo longe illustrissime, responderem Pighio’ (I purchased this book in order to respond to Pighius at the command of my most illustrious prince). On this copy see Mark Rankin, ‘John Leland, Henry VIII, and Albert Pighius’s Hierarchiae Ecclesiasticae Assertio’, The Library, forthcoming.

⁴⁵ On the Antiphilarchia see De uiris illustribus, ed. Carley, pp. xxxvi–xxxvii.

⁴⁶ Quoted in De uiris illustribus, ed. Carley, p. xcix.

⁴⁷ See ibid.

⁴⁸ See Dumville, Annals of St Neots, pp. lxiv–lxv: ‘Palaeographical evidence of varying sorts has confirmed the Bury origin of the manuscript and indicated its quasi-authorial status. Likewise, the evidence for dating the scribes and their other endeavours has enabled the dating of the text to be narrowed to approximately the two decades 1120–40’.

⁴⁹ Collectanea III, 214.

⁵⁰ On Rous see above n. 34. On the question of Alfred’s putative role in the foundation of Oxford, see more generally Keynes, S., ‘The Cult of King Alfred the Great’, ASE 28 (1999), 225–356 Google Scholar, at 325–27.

⁵¹ ‘All this is clear from the history by Asser of St Davids, who accurately recorded the deeds of Alfred’, De uiris illustribus, ed. Carley, pp. 242–43.

⁵² ‘This is quite certain, since Asser makes the following statement concerning the distribution of Alfred’s fortune: “He gave a third to the school which he had worked hard to establish for many noble boys, and even commoners, of his own race”’ (De uiris illustribus, ed. Carley, pp. 242–43). See De rebus gestis Aelfredi regis cii. 17–19, in Asser’s Life of King Alfred: Together with the Annals of Saint Neots Erroneously Ascribed to Asser, ed. W. H. Stevenson, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1959), pp. 88–9.

⁵³ ‘Following his authority Marianus Scottus, who had evidently come across a copy of Asser’s Annals, asserts the same facts’, De uiris illustribus, ed. Carley, pp. 242–43.

⁵⁴ The Chronicle of John of Worcester, ed. R. R. Darlington and P. McGurk, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1995–), II, 330–1.

⁵⁵ ‘Ex Chronico Mariani Scotti’ (Collectanea III, 276–89).

⁵⁶ De uiris illustribus, ed. Carley, pp. 244–45.

⁵⁷ ‘To this may be added Roger of Howden’s verdict: “He was the most skilful of all Saxon poets, most vigilant in the service of God, and most methodical in searching out the right judgements”’, De uiris illustribus, ed. Carley, pp. 244–45.

⁵⁸ On this manuscript see Dumville, D. N., ‘The Sixteenth-Century History of Two Cambridge Books from Sawley’, Trans. of the Cambridge Bibliographical Soc. 7 (1980), 427–44Google Scholar; also the relevant page of Medieval Primary Sources: Genre, Rhetoric and Transmission. HIST424, ed. P. Hayward, https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/haywardp/hist424/seminars/Corpus139.htm.

⁵⁹ See Lapidge, ‘Byrhtferth of Ramsey and the Early Sections of the Historia Regum Attributed to Symeon of Durham’, ASE 10 (1982), 97–122, at 98 and 121.

⁶⁰ ‘These are taken from the historian Asser’, Collectanea III, 353.

⁶¹ ‘[it is described most clearly of all] in the abridgement of Asser’s Annals’ … ‘the history of a certain scribe, who was most intimate with Alfred, and wrote his deeds’ (De uiris illustribus, ed. Carley, pp. 248–49).

⁶² ‘Meanwhile, I must point out that Asser was eager to bring about the enduring and splendid memory, fame, and glory of his patron through every means, and depicted his Life and all his illustrious deeds in a book of annals that will endure, written in a style befitting his royal subject. Like a rare Apelles he finally set out his pictures for the general gaze. Marianus Scottus, quite captivated by their beauty, avidly picked flowers like little stars from them to include as highlights in his own history’, De uiris illustribus, ed. Carley, pp. 256–57.

⁶³ Leland’s source is once again John of Worcester’s chronicle.

⁶⁴ On this topic see Gallagher, ‘Asser and the Writing’, pp. 780–1.

⁶⁵ Here I disagree with Martin who states in his ‘Un-Editing Alfred: Rethinking Modern Editions of Pre-modern Texts from a Post-modern Sensibility’ that ‘The epistolary salutation addressing Alfred at the very start of the text in Cotton Otho A. xii is evidently the sole source for Leland’s ascription of the Vita to Asser’ (p. 145).

⁶⁶ His reasoning may not have been right – it is not certain that the Asser referred to in the Fitzhugh Chronicle is the author of Otho A. xii – but his conclusion certainly was.

⁶⁷ A version of this paper was given at the London Manuscripts Seminar on 14 January 2020. Even earlier I discussed Parker’s edition of the Vita Ælfredi regis in a keynote address at a conference on ‘Matthew Parker: Archbishop, Scholar, and Collector’ at Cambridge, 19 March 2016. I am indebted to Professor Simon Keynes for his careful reading and advice on a preliminary draft. Dr Robert Gallagher also made helpful suggestions, for which I thank him. The comments of the two anonymous readers were especially pertinent.