Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Cokayne, Thomas (1519?-1592)
COKAYNE, Sir THOMAS (1519?–1592), hunt-master, born about 1519, was the eldest son of Francis Cokayne or Cockaine of Ashbourne, Derbyshire, by his wife, Dorothy, daughter and heiress of Thomas Marrow, serjeant-at-law (Cockayne Memoranda, 1st series, pp. 246). Thomas was brought up in the house of the Earl of Shrewsbury, but succeeding to the family estates at the age of nineteen, on the death of his father in 1538, he was known as 'a professed hunter and not a scholler' for fifty-two years, and he became a great hunting authority. In 1544 he was sent by Henry VIII to Scotland, and knighted for his services. About 1547 he married Dorothy, daughter of Sir Humphrey Ferrers of Tamworth Castle (at that time married to Cokayne's widowed mother). By this marriage he had several children, among them a son, Edward, the father of Thomas Cokayne, lexicographer [q. v.] In 1548 Cokayne was sent by Edward VI to 'rescue the siege at Haddington,' after which he returned to his country occupations, which he never again left. He served several times as high sheriff; he was arbitrator in 1550 in a Ashbourne and became one of the governors. His most important county work was in 1587, when Sir Ralph Sadler, then conducting Mary Stuart from Wingfield to Tutbury, desired him ‘to be ready to attend the queene to Derbie, with but a small traine.’ After this he prepared his book, ‘A Short Treatise of Hunting, compyled for the Delight of Noblemen and Gentlemen,’ and dating it ‘from my house neere Ashbourne, the last of December 1590,’ he dedicated it to Gilbert Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, the grandson of his early friend, and it was published in 1591. This quaint, little work concludes with directions for blowing huntsmen's horns. These are, Cokayne asserts, the identical measures of blowing ordered by Sir Tristram, King Arthur's knight, whose ‘first principles of hunting, hawking, and blowing’ are the best he knows.
Cokayne was of the reformed religion. He died in 1592, aged about seventy-two, and was buried at night on 15 Nov. at Ashbourne. The monument erected to him and his wife (who died 1595) still exists.
[Cockaine's Hunting n.p.; Cockayne Memoranda, 1st ser. pp. 24–6.]