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.
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-sca