raised to the bench as chief baron of the exchequer, and knighted. As chief baron his name frequently occurs on commissions (Gairdner, Letters and Papers, vols. x. xi.; Baker, Hist. of St. John's Coll., by Mayor, i. 352), but he seems to have taken no prominent part, even at such important trials as those of Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More. After continuing at the head of the exchequer for sixteen years he was advanced to the dignity of chief justice of the king's bench on 9 Nov. 1546. Before this time we find him residing at Southampton, and possessed of large property in Hampshire. Leland, who visited Southampton, writes: ‘The house that Master Lighster, chiefe Barne of the King's Escheker, dwellyth yn, is very fair’ (Itin. iii. 77). In the capacity of chief justice Lyster attested the submission of Thomas Howard II [q. v.], third duke of Norfolk (12 Jan. 1547), whom it was one of Henry's last acts to commit to the Tower. On the accession of Edward VI he was reappointed to his office, and his address to a body of new serjeants on their inauguration at Lincoln's Inn shortly afterwards is described by Dugdale as ‘a godly, thowghe sumwhat prolixe and long declaration of their duties.’ He resigned his office on 21 March 1552, and spent the remainder of his life at Southampton, dying there on 14 March 1553–4. Lyster was a sound but undistinguished lawyer.
His first wife was Jane, daughter of Sir Ralph Shirley of Westmeston, Sussex, and widow of Sir John Dawtrey of Petworth; her portrait, by Holbein, is in the queen's collection at Windsor. His second wife, Elizabeth Stoke, who survived him, erected in 1567 to his memory a monument in St. Michael's Church, Southampton, which was long believed to be the tomb of Lord-chancellor Wriothesley, first earl of Southampton, who died in 1550. The mistake was corrected by Sir Frederick Madden in 1845. By his second wife Lyster had a son, Michael, who died in London, and was buried on 22 Aug. 1551; and a daughter, Elizabeth, who became the wife of Sir Richard Blount. His will, dated 10 Oct. 1552, was proved on 16 April 1554.
[Sir F. Madden's Paper in the Proceedings at the Annual Meeting of Archæolog. Inst. at Winchester, September 1845; Foss's Judges of England, v. 305; Dugdale's Origines, 3rd ed. p. 329; Woodward and Wilks's General Hist. of Hampshire, ii. 285.]
LYTE, HENRY (1529?–1607), botanist and antiquary, born at Lytescary, Somerset, about 1529, was the eleventh in direct descent of his name settled at that place, and was the second and eldest surviving son of John Lyte, by his first wife, Edith Horsey, who died in 1556. Lyte became a student at Oxford about 1546; but it is doubtful if he took a degree. Anthony à Wood writes of him: ‘After he had spent some years in logic and philosophy, and in other good learning, he travelled into foreign countries, and at length retired to his patrimony, where, by the advantage of a good foundation of literature made in the university and abroad, he became a most excellent scholar in several sorts of learning.’ His son records that he ‘was admitted of Clyffordes Inne.’ From 1559 he seems to have managed his father's Somerset estate until the latter's death in 1576, when his stepmother, who had already sown discord between him and his father, brought a writ of dower against him. Lyte seems to have served as sheriff, or perhaps only as under-sheriff, of Somerset during the reign of Mary, and perhaps until the second year of Elizabeth. He died in the house in which he was born, on 15 Oct. 1607, and was buried at the north end of the transept of Charlton Mackrell Church. Lyte was thrice married: in September 1546 to Agnes, daughter and heiress of John Kelloway of Collumpton, Devon, who died in 1564, and by whom he had five daughters; in July 1565 to Frances, daughter of John Tiptoft, citizen of London, who died in 1589, and by whom he had three sons and two daughters; and in 1591 to Dorothy, daughter of John Gover of Somerton, Somerset, by whom he had two sons and a daughter.
Lyte was a distant connection of Aubrey, who speaks of his ‘deare grandfather Lyte,’ and of a ‘cos. Lyte of Lytes-Cary,’ and says that Henry Lyte ‘had a pretty good collection of plants for that age,’ though an extant list in the handwriting of Lyte's second son and successor, Thomas, enumerates only various fruit-trees.
Lyte's first and most important work was his translation of the ‘Cruydeboeck’ of Rembert Dodoens (Antwerp, 1554), which he executed from the French translation of De l'Escluse (1557). His copy of the French edition, with numerous notes in Latin and English in his neat handwriting, endorsed ‘Henry Lyte taught me to speake English,’ is now in the British Museum. The first edition of the translation was printed in folio at Antwerp, in order to secure the woodcuts of the original. It has 779 pages and 870 cuts, about thirty of which are original, and is mostly in black letter. It bears the title, ‘A niewe Herball or Historie of Plantes. … first set foorth in the Doutche or Almaigne tongue by that learned D. Rembert Dodoens, Physition to the Emperour, and now
