Thomas Tusser

Thomas Tusser (1524 – 3 May 1580) was an English poet and farmer, best known for his instructional poem Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, an expanded version of his original title, A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie, first published in 1557.

Five Hundred Points contains these rhyming couplets:

Swéete April showers,
Doo spring Maie flowers.

and

A foole and his monie be soone at debate,
which after with sorrow repents him too late.

The latter is an early version of the proverb A fool and his money are soon parted.

Tusser was born in Rivenhall, Essex, in about 1524, the son of William and Isabella Tusser. At a very early age he became a chorister in the St Nicholas collegiate chapel at Wallingford Castle, Wallingford, Oxfordshire. He appears to have been pressed for service in the King's Chapel, the choristers of which were usually afterwards placed by the king in one of the royal foundations at Oxford or Cambridge. But Tusser entered the choir of St. Paul's Cathedral, and from there went to Eton College. He has left a quaint account of his privations at Wallingford, and of the severities of Nicholas Udall at Eton.

He was elected to King's College, Cambridge in 1543, a date which sets the earliest limit of his birth-year, as he would have been ineligible at nineteen. From King's College he moved to Trinity Hall, Cambridge. On leaving Cambridge, he went to court in the service of William Paget, 1st Baron Paget of Beaudesart, as a musician. After ten years of life at court, he married and settled as a farmer at Cattawade, Suffolk, near the River Stour.

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