Between early summer 1540 and the new year of 1541, Alexander Nowell composed the only surviving Latin letter from England to Sir Thomas Wyatt. On behalf of the Dean and Chapter of Norwich Cathedral, he asks Wyatt, Sir Francis Bryan, and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, to help the new foundation resist the expropriation of its properties. The letter fills in several biographical lacunae for this prominent trio of courtiers.  It provides primary evidence of Wyatt’s membership and sponsorship of English humanist networks.  It offers the first sure evidence of Wyatt’s contact with Surrey, corroborating the evidence of Surrey’s poetry.  It reveals the association of Wyatt, Surrey, and Bryan with evangelical figures: Nowell, later Dean of St Paul’s, was already a central figure in Oxford reform.  And it presents an intricate example of the chains of patronage that reached, in the wake of the dissolution, across the universities, the new fleet of cathedral foundations, and the heights of the Henrician court.

Our decades-long project to disambiguate the two Laurences Nowell is substantially complete. One (c.1516–76) was Dean of Lichfield from 1560 to his death, brother of Alexander Nowell, schoolmaster of Westminster and Dean of St Paul’s. The other (c.1530–69), of greater interest to intellectual history, was an antiquary, cartographer, and pioneer in Old English scholarship, cousin to Alexander. Some outstanding questions, however, remain. In the present note, I adduce evidence from the Vice-Principal’s Register at Brasenose demonstrating that it was Laurence Nowell, not his elder brother Alexander, who left Brasenose to become a schoolmaster in 1546; and Laurence the future Dean of Lichfield, not his cousin Laurence the antiquary, who served as master of the grammar school at Sutton Coldfield from 1546 to 1550.