Laurence Nowell

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

Laurence Nowell was born around 1530 in Whalley, Lancashire, the second son of Alexander Nowell of Read Hall and Grace Catterall of Great Mitton, Lancashire. He may have started school at Whalley Abbey and sometime later may have attended Westminster School, 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, 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). He also studied the Exeter Book, annotating folios 9r and 10r amongst others.

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