IN THE 1380s, John Trevisa, translating Ranulf Higden's Polychronicon, produced an idyllic description of English landscape:

Higden's sources, including Bede, Gerald of Wales, Pliny and Isidore of Seville, were equally complimentary about England's waterways, surrounding oceans, and mineral wealth. The seas allegedly contained ‘margery perles of alle manere colour and hewe’, the land bore ‘salt welles and hote welles’ and ‘plentevous … veynes of metals, of bras, of iren, of leed, of tyn, of siluer also’. England's arable and pastoral riches could hardly be over-stated. The countryside was naturally fertile, but super-excellent marl also ensured that ‘[th]e lond is [th]e better foure score [y]ere [th]at [th]ere wi[th] is I-marled’. Good beasts abounded, the bad were almost absent: ‘[Th]ere bee[th] schepe [th]at bere[th] good wolle, [th]ere bee[th] meny hertes and wylde bestes and fewe wolues.’ In short the English landscape was characterised by a constant plenitude of all resources, agricultural, aquacultural, wild, and mineral. The final poem recapitulates:

Higden's prose is not a ‘landscape description’ in our terms; it evokes no photographic rural images, but rather a catalogue of useful products. Nevertheless, though the word ‘landscape’ was not coined in his day, it is hard to characterise Higden's series of observations about a countryside and its riches without resorting to the phrase ‘landscape description’. I have therefore made no attempt to avoid the term.

How, if at all, does this idealistic view of the land help us to understand late medieval perceptions of Norfolk landscape? Higden, after all, wrote almost entirely before the onset of the Black Death, basing his work on extracts from even earlier classical and medieval sources. Also, he accorded so little significance to East Anglia that Norfolk and Suffolk rate only eleven lines out of his twenty-two chapters of the description of England; while his preoccupation with Roman-founded towns led him to exclude Norwich altogether from his list of noble cities.