The dedication of the herbal, in its completed form, to Queen Elizabeth, throws some light on Turner’s life, and incidentally on that illustrious lady herself. The doctor recalls, with pardonable pride and perhaps a touch of blarney, an occasion on which the Princess Elizabeth, as she then was, had conversed with him in Latin. “As for your knowledge in the Latin tonge,” he writes, “xviii yeares ago or more, I had in the Duke of Somersettes house (beynge his Physition at that tyme) a good tryal thereof, when as it pleased your grace to speake Latin unto me: for although I have both in England, lowe and highe Germanye, and other places of my longe traveil and pelgrimage, never spake with any noble or gentle woman, that spake so wel and so much congrue fyne and pure Latin, as your grace did unto me so longe ago.” Turner defends himself against the insinuation that “a booke intreatinge onelye of trees, herbes and wedes, and shrubbes, is not a mete present for a prince,” and certainly, if we accept his account of the state of knowledge at the time, the need for such a book must have been most urgent. He explains that, while he was still at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, he endeavoured to learn the names of plants, but, “suche was the ignorance in simples at that tyme,” that he could get no information on the subject, even from physicians. He claims that his herbal has considerable originality—a claim which seems well founded. In his own words—“they that have red the first part of my Herbal, and have compared my writinges of plantes with those thinges that Matthiolus, Fuchsius, Tragus, and Dodoneus wrote in y^e firste editiones of their Herballes, maye easily perceyve that I taught the truthe of certeyne plantes, which these above named writers either knew not at al, or ellis erred in them greatlye.... So y^t as I learned something of them, so they ether might or did learne somthinge of me agayne, as their second editions maye testifye. And because I would not be lyke unto a cryer y^t cryeth a loste horse in the marketh, and telleth all the markes and tokens that he hath, and yet never sawe the horse, nether coulde knowe the horse if he sawe him: I wente into Italye and into diverse partes of Germany, to knowe and se the herbes my selfe.”