Mascall, Leonard
- John Considine
Mascall, Leonard (d. 1589), translator and author, was a near kinsman of Eustace Mascall (d. 1567), clerk of the works at Christ Church, Oxford, Hampton Court Palace, and other buildings of Henry VIII; he may have been the son of Eustace's brother, Evan Mascall (fl. 1531). In 1569 his Booke of the Art and Maner, howe to Plante and Graffe All Sortes of Trees was published. This was partly a translation of Davy Brossard's L'art et maniere de semer, et faire pepinieres des sauvageaux, and was partly 'taken out of diuerse Authors' (sig. A4v); the last third was from a Dutch or German work. Thirteen further editions, one of them a piracy, appeared between 1572 and 1656.
By 1573 Mascall was clerk of the kitchen to Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury. In this year he transcribed the parish register of Farnham Royal, Buckinghamshire, with Thomas Cromwell's injunctions and English verses of his own on the keeping of such records, at the request of Eustace Mascall, 'because their Friends were Christend Marryd & buryed in yt Parish' (Wright, fols. 101v–102). This transcript appears no longer to be extant. In 1581 he produced The Husbandlye Ordring and Gouernmente of Poultrie, which was based on French versions of Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella's work on agriculture (De re rustica), and Charles Estienne's Praedium rusticum. It was dedicated to Katherine Woodford of Britwell, near Farnham Royal, whose husband James was chief clerk of the kitchen to the queen. (Mascall's two other dedications were both to aristocrats with Buckinghamshire marriage connections.) A book of recipes for removing stains, dyeing, dressing leather, gilding and soldering various metals, and hardening and softening iron and steel, translated from Dutch or German, followed in 1583; a translation of selected apothecarial recipes from the Latin Dispensatorium ad aromaticos attributed to Nicolaus Praepositi appeared in 1587; and a book on animal husbandry, claiming to draw on the practice of 'straungers as of our owne country men' (sig. A3v) was published in the same year. This work appeared in numerous editions, well into the seventeenth century, and, like others by Mascall, was a source for Gervase Markham's very successful writings.
Mascall's last book, entered in the Stationers' Company's registers in 1587 and published posthumously in 1590, was A Booke of Fishing with Hooke and Line (with a long appendix on traps for vermin); this was based on the Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle which had accompanied the Book of St Albans since 1496, and was a major source for Izaak Walton's Compleat Angler. It contains the story that one of the Mascalls of Plumpton in Sussex (a family to which the writer was not related) introduced carp and pippins into England, and this has, mistakenly, been taken as an autobiographical statement. Leonard Mascall was buried at Farnham Royal in early May 1589.
Sources
- N. Wright, response to questionnaire, 1712, Bodl. Oxf., MS Rawl. D. 1480, fols. 101–2
- I. Walton, The compleat angler, 1653–1676, ed. J. Bevan (1983)
- B. Henrey, British botanical and horticultural literature before 1800, 1 (1975)
- F. C. Carr-Gomm, Records of the parish of Farnham Royal, Bucks (1901)
- F. N. L. Poynter, Bibliography of Gervase Markham, 1568?–1637 (1962)
- LP Henry VIII, vol. 5
- H. M. Colvin and others, The history of the king's works, 4 (1982)
Likenesses
- R. Gaywood, etching, pubd 1662, BM