Edwarde Potter’s Booke of Phisicke and Chirurgery[1]* is a manuscript from the beginning of the seventeenth century, in Newcastle Antiquaries’ collection at Northumberland Archives. It contains about 1500 recipes, mostly medical but with some others as well. It is bound together with an eighteenth century manuscript, mainly of recipes, which we may look at in a future blog. Digital images of the whole book can be found on the Antiquaries’ website, along with transcriptions of every page, done by a group of volunteers.
Who was Edward Potter?
When we began work on the document we had no idea who Edwarde Potter might be. However, there were some clues in the text. The front page is dated 1610, and there is a date of 1594 inside, at the beginning of an inventory of Edwarde’s books, all of them bibles and Protestant commentaries on the scriptures. The other clue that Edwarde gave was that he had taken some remedies from a book “found in the Parson’s study of Warlingham”. We found the village of Warlingham, on the Surrey-Kent border.
So it appeared that Edwarde Potter was a literate man, living in the late 16th, early 17th century. He had a library of books and knew a clergyman, the Vicar of Warlingham, from whom he has had remedies for common ailments that are included in his book. With these facts in mind, we searched the Probate and Wills section of an online genealogy subscription site (findmypast.co.uk).
And there was an Edward Potter who appeared to fulfil the criteria! He was a clergyman in Tatsfield, a small village on the Surrey/ Kent border five miles from Warlingham, who died in 1612. He possessed, by the standards of the day, a large collection of books. In his will he gave two of his daughters 20 books each and left the residue of all his printed books to be divided equally among his sons.[2]
According to The Clergy of the Church of England database (theclergydatabase.org.uk) he was installed as Rector of Tatsfield in 1571. Until 1595 the Vicar of Warlingham was Richard Redworth, then William Parker was appointed Vicar. When Potter died in 1612, William Parker succeeded him. These men would undoubtedly have known each other.
Edward’s will, together with those of his wife Joan[3] and son William[4], has allowed us to construct a family tree of 3 generations. Edward was married to Joan and they had three sons, Thomas, William and Edward and three daughters, Mary, Elizabeth and Theophila. So from a name, Edwarde Potter, a date 1610, and a village in Surrey we have been able to trace the likely owner of our document.
What the book contains
Each of the seven sections of the book contains a series of recipes, neatly numbered and laid out – until the last few pages, when someone else has evidently taken over and it is all much more slapdash. Some of the recipes are for cookery, especially for sweet biscuits and for preserving cherries, quinces, or damsons. Others are household hints – how to perfume gloves or make ‘washing balls’. A few verge on the magical – do you want to know how to get out the precious stone which, apparently, every water snake has in its belly? Mostly, though, they are medical remedies for a wide range of ailments, from migraine to bladder and kidney complaints, the ‘French pox’ (syphilis), melancholy (depression) and a woman’s heavy periods.
A few of the remedies are very simple, using one or two herbs, milk and eggs; one for a cough is an egg custard with rosewater. But most of them are complex, using a whole variety of ingredients, and often several stages of preparation, and are the sort of prescriptions you might have obtained from a physician, if you could afford one and if there were any nearby. They would have been hard work to prepare, with herbs and spices being ‘stamped’ (crushed) in a mortar, ‘seethed’ (simmered) over a fire for a long period, and often finally distilled into what was seen as a pure and concentrated form, in the same way as wine is distilled into brandy.
As for the ingredients… many contain a dozen or more herbs, but also spices, chemicals and minerals which would have had to be bought from one of the London apothecaries’ warehouses. Newly discovered plants and trees from the New World of the Americas also make their appearance, alongside mercury and vitriol (sulphuric acid). More startlingly to our eyes, there are also animal parts, animal waste, and human blood, milk, and urine. This is not unusual in the medicine of the time; some of the ideas were carried over from ancient times, and there was a school of thought that God had put everything on the earth for human use, and so it should all be used for curing humans.
How much good would recipes like the Reverend Potter’s have done? Not a lot, and in some cases positive harm. Quite a few of these remedies are very nasty indeed, and in the ‘don’t try this at home’ category. But we have to bear in mind that when someone vomited up the medicine they had been given, that was seen as a sign that it was working and ‘purging’ them of the disease, rather than being an unpleasant side-effect!
There is a lot to be said for modern medicine!
This blog is a collaboration between Kath Smith from Explore Lifelong Learning in Newcastle and Sue Ward from the Society Antiquaries Newcastle Upon Tyne.
With thanks for help and encouragement with this project to Dr Marie Addyman; Reverent Vincent Short, Vicar of Tatsfield and his wife Veronica; Chris Broomfield, Kent Archaeology and David Rymill, Hampshire Record Office.
[1] phisicke’ means medicine and ‘chirurgery’ means surgery
[2] Surrey & South London Will Abstracts, 1470-1856 Surrey Archdeaconry Court. V8 Register ‘Berry’ 1608-1615. Abstract reference: SW/8
[3] Kent Wills and Probate Indexes 1328-1890: Rochester Consistory Court: Document Ref: DRb/Pw24
[4] Surrey & South London Will Abstracts, 1470-1856: Surrey Archdeaconry Court Vol. 9 Register ‘Stoughton’ 1614-1621: Abstract reference: SW/9_593