The Doctor’s Garden: medicine, science, and horticulture in Britain (Yale University Press, London, 2022)

This volume is the third in a series cataloguing the Duke of Norfolk’s deeds at Arundel Castle in West Sussex, one of the largest private collections of family and estate papers in Britain. It has been prepared (with the aid of a team of cataloguers) by the longstanding castle archivist Heather Warne, and largely concerns the estates in the county of Norfolk acquired by the earliest-known ancestors of the current duke, notably the lawyer and judge William Howard (d. 1308). Around 750 items have been catalogued (i.e. summarised, rather than transcribed in full) for this volume, mostly dating from the period 1200–1600, and readers will be glad to learn that the editor took the decision to translate the most important sections of the originals into English, ‘as few people are taught Latin these days’ (p. xxv). The real interest in this material for the landscape historian lies in the wealth of detail the deeds provide on medieval micro-topography, with hundreds (if not thousands) of minor place-names recited, and frequent reference given to significant landscape features, such as open fields, fenland marshes, deer parks, and even specific buildings. A highlight is a rare specification (giving measurements and materials) dated 1422 for a new roof for the Trinity Guildhall in King’s Lynn. We also learn the name of a ferryboat operating in the town in 1281 — the bawdy-sounding ‘Strudecunte’ — and in reading the deeds of Ingoldisthorpe and Snettisham parishes ‘the reader is transported to the lost landscape of open arable farming in the thirteenth century’ (p. 5). A deed of 1279, for example, specifies the right to graze pigs and geese ‘but not other animals’ in the common marsh of Ingoldisthorpe (p. 31), and saltpans (salinis) are mentioned in North Wotton in 1323 (p. 36). Several deeds throughout the book detail the medieval practices by which lords and tenants consolidated blocks of land in the open fields and eventually enclosed them into private hedged closes. The process was already taking place in thirteenth century Ingoldisthorpe (p. 5), and from Wiggenhall there is a remarkable series of deeds detailing exchanges of strips in the open fields c. 1280–1308 (p. 87). At Hingham in the fifteenth century farmers ‘were slowly steering towards private farming practice in newly acquired fields, referred to in the deeds as enclosures or closes’ (p. 310). The book is divided into ten sections, of which nine concern the parts of the county to which the deeds relate: namely, the areas of King’s Lynn, Wiggenhall, North Walsham, Kenninghall, Banham, Attleborough, Hingham, Hardingham, and Ashwellthorpe. Short introductions are given to each section, before the deeds themselves are presented, giving full details of parties, witnesses, dates, and substance. Some of the deeds and their seals are illustrated with black and white photographs, and there is a helpful glossary as well as two indexes arranged by (1) parties, places and subjects, and (2) surnames. Considering the wealth and interest of the minor toponymic material contained in the book, it is a shame that the names of furlongs ‘seemed too many to accommodate in the index’ (p. 431). The only other criticism this reviewer has concerns the highly speculative discussion of the origin of the surname Howard on pp. 40–1, which flies in the face of more credible scholarship (presented in the 2016 Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland) linking it to various Middle English personal names with Continental Germanic or Old Scandinavian roots. However, this does not detract from what is otherwise an excellent volume which will surely be of enormous value to local and landscape historians in Norfolk and beyond.