Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Thomas Tusser

TUSSER, Thomas (c. 1527-1580), poet, was the son of William Tusser by Isabella, daughter of Thomas Smith of Rivenhall, Essex, where he was born about 1527. Notwithstanding strong reluctance on his part he was sent in his early years to a music school, and became chorister in the collegiate chapel of the castle of Wallingford. He was afterwards admitted into the choir of St Paul's, and went thence to Eton, where he was under the tuition of Nicholas Udall. In 1 543 he was elected to King's College, Cambridge, and soon afterwards exchanged to Trinity Hall. On leaving the university he was for about ten years at court, probably in some musical capacity. He then settled as a farmer in Suffolk, near the river Stour, an employment which he seems to have regarded as combining the chief essentials of human felicity. Subsequently he lived successively at Ipswich, West Dereham, Norwich, and London. There he died in April 1580, and was buried in the church of St Mildred in the Poultry. His monument was destroyed in the fire, but the quaint epitaph is preserved in Stow's Survey of London. A marble tablet, on which the epitaph is inscribed, has been erected to him in the church of Manningtree, Essex.

Tusser's poems on husbandry have the charm of simplicity and directness, and their practical saws were apparently relished, for in his lifetime they went through a number of editions. They are A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie, 1557, 1561, 1562, 1564, and 1570; A Dialogue Wyuynge and Thryuynge, 1562; A Hundrethe Good Pointes of Husbandrie lately married unto a Hundrethe Good Pointes of Huswifry, 1570; Five Hundreth Pointes of Good Husbandrie united to as many of Good Wiferie, 1573, 1576, 1577, 1585, 1586, 1590, 1593, reprinted with memoir by William Mavor, 1812, by Auber, 1873, and by the English Dialect Society, 1879. His metrical autobiography, printed in the Appendix to Five Hundreth Pointes, 1573, was republished in 1846 along with his will, which would seem to refute the sarcasms which became current, that he had not been successful in practising his own maxims. One of these references is contained in a volume of epigrams by H. P., The More the Merrier, 1608. One of the epigrams entitled Ad Tusserum, begins thus:

"Tusser, they tell me, when thou wert alive,
Thou, teaching thrift, thyselfe could'st never thrive."

Possibly Tusser obtained the reputation of being poor from his practice of thrift; but in any case, if his will represents his worldly condition at the time of his death, he was not in poverty in his later years.