NOWELL, LAURENCE, son of Alexander Nowell, Read Hall, Whalley, Lancs., and Grace, dau. of Rafe Catherall, Mitton, Lancs.; a kinsman of Alexander Nowell, Head Master; b. c. 1531 (aged 19 at 12 Apr 1550); adm.; KS; left 1549 (Chapter Muniments); Christ Church, Oxford, residing 1550-3, Student in 1552-3 (name in college buttery books to 24 Dec 1554); BA 1552; studying and travelling in France and Flanders 1553-4; tutor to “Mr. Harringeton’s sons” (perhaps sons of Sir James Harington, Exton, Rutland) in France and at Padua, Italy, before Dec 1558; probably the individual of this name who was MP Knaresborough Jan – May 1559; joined household of William Cecil c. 1562; a pioneer cartographer and one of the earliest scholars to take a serious interest in manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon period; left England 25 Mar 1567; subsequent travels on the European continent took him to Paris, Venice, Padua, Vienna, Basel, Leipzig (by Aug 1569) and Freiburg im Breisgau (Oct 1569); not subsequently heard of; his chattels in England had been left by him in the possession of his close friend and fellow antiquary William Lambarde, who was asked to hand them over to Nowell’s family in a complaint filed in the Court of Requests in 1571; his Vocabularium Saxonicum, surviving in manuscript, was first published in 1952; William Camden describes him as “vir rara doctrina insignis, & qui Saxonicam maiorum nostrorum linguam … primus nostra aetate resuscitavit”; for his career and scholarly achievement see Carl T. Berkhout, “Laurence Nowell (1530 – ca. 1570)”, in Helen Damico (and others) (ed), Medieval scholarship, Biographical, Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, New York, 1998.
