Thomas Tusser Biography Quotes 7 Report mistakes

7 Quotes
Occup.	Poet
From	England
Born	1524 AC
Died	1580 AC

Overview
Thomas Tusser, born around 1524 and deceased around 1580, is remembered as an English writer of didactic verse whose practical poems on farming and household management shaped the language and literature of husbandry in the Tudor period. Best known for A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie and its greatly enlarged successor, Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, he combined experience, observation, and mnemonic rhyme to organize the rhythms of rural life into a month-by-month guide. His verses preserved proverbial wisdom and everyday practice at a moment when England was experiencing religious change, economic adjustment, and growing interest in improvement.

Early Life and Education
Tradition places Tusser's origins in Essex, and his own autobiographical verses suggest modest beginnings alongside a precocious musical gift. As a boy he was placed in a choir school, and he is commonly associated with St Paul's Cathedral in London, where the noted organist and composer John Redford trained generations of choristers. Tusser later recalled the rigors and rewards of this formation: the discipline of learning, the strain of service, and the durable habit of order that would color his writing. From St Paul's he moved into the elite educational track of the day as a scholar at Eton College. There he came under the formidable headmaster Nicholas Udall, a figure famed for both classical learning and severe discipline; Tusser's lines about school life echo the hardships endured under such tutelage. Associations with Cambridge followed, where the musical and scholarly paths of choristers often continued, further broadening his acquaintance with humanist study and the practical Latin that shaped his didactic style.

Music, Court, and the Turn to Husbandry
Stories circulated that Tusser served as a singer beyond school, possibly in the orbit of the royal household, an unsurprising fate for a trained chorister in the 1540s and 1550s. Whether at court or in gentry households, such employment would have exposed him to patrons, stewards, and the intricate management of estates. Yet Tusser redirected his life toward farming. In verse prefacing his books, he recounts a restless sequence of employments and removals, moving between service, tenancy, and instruction. He married and later married again, and the need to sustain a household sharpened his interest in practical economy. He tried his hand at agriculture in East Anglia, a region of mixed farming, dairying, and cloth-making, and learned how precarious husbandry could be for tenants subject to rents, weather, and fluctuating markets.

Books of Husbandry and Housewifery
Tusser's breakthrough came with A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie (first published in the 1550s), a compact poem that distilled a farmer's calendar into memorable rhymes. It was later expanded into the widely read Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, into which he folded not only fieldwork but also housewifery, dairying, brewing, baking, preservation, and the management of servants. Organized by the months, his verses mark when to plough and harrow, how to hedge and ditch, when to sow barley or set beans, when to watch for rot in sheep or scab in fruit, and how to keep stores from waste. He pairs instructions with cautions and closes many sections with short proverbial couplets that made his counsel portable for readers who might never own more than a handful of books. London printers kept the work in circulation with frequent editions and enlargements, a sign that his blend of counsel and cadence met a real need among farmers, stewards, and housekeepers.

Voice, Themes, and Proverbial Reach
Tusser's voice is homely, direct, and orderly. He favors short lines and regular rhyme as memory aids, and he is happiest where advice meets habit: feed the plough team, drain the wet patch, keep accounts, pay at fair times, beware of idleness. He writes not as a theorist but as one who has lost crops to blight and money to needless buying, and who has learned to scale effort to season. Many phrases that English speakers treat as old saws gained currency through his pages, among them the often-cited lines commonly rendered as a fool and his money are soon parted and Christmas comes but once a year. He also stresses reciprocity between husband and wife, master and servant, landlord and tenant, taking care to praise diligence and thrift while warning against false economies. This moralized practicality lent his poetry longevity, making it useful in the dairy, the fields, and the schoolroom alike.

Circles and Readers
The people who shaped Tusser's career were rooted in the institutions of Tudor learning and worship. John Redford's musicianship at St Paul's modeled for him how craft and discipline might yield lasting art. Nicholas Udall's pedagogy at Eton, however controversial, pressed classical forms and mnemonic discipline upon students who would carry them into adulthood. Beyond these early guides, Tusser's audience brought him into a larger community: estate stewards who calculated rent and rotation; parish clergy who sought orderly households; and London printers and booksellers who found steady buyers among improving farmers. Antiquaries like John Stow later took notice of the man behind the verses, preserving details of his memory for readers after his death. In an age that also produced reformers, chroniclers, and poets, Tusser's particular niche was to make practical counsel sing.

Hardship, Mobility, and Character
Tusser did not romanticize the countryside. He admits to mischance, lawsuits, bad seasons, and hard landlords. He repeatedly counsels that tenants keep peace with neighbors, settle debts punctually, and store grain against lean years. The many removals he recounts give a picture of mid-Tudor mobility: rising and falling fortunes, experiments in new places, and the inevitable trade-offs between opportunity and risk. These experiences give his poems a lived-in texture, less about triumph than about steadiness and care. His respect for housewifery as a skilled art places women's labor at the center of household prosperity, a notable emphasis for the time.

Later Years and Death
In his final years Tusser appears again in the metropolis, where bookmen, patrons, and presses gathered. Reports place his death around 1580, likely in London. Later sources speak of a memorial connected with St Paul's, a fitting circle back to his earliest formation, though the details were subject to the city's many later losses. The cadence of his own epitaph-like lines, scattered through his books, suggest how he wanted to be remembered: as one who assembled many small precepts into a larger pattern of good order.

Legacy
Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry remained in print for generations, informing later writers on agriculture and household management and serving as a window onto Tudor rural life. Its pages preserve seasonal custom, working vocabulary, and the social economy of fields and kitchens. Readers have valued Tusser both as a witness to everyday practice and as a shaper of proverbial English. Though much about his life is glimpsed through the fugal self-portrait he left in verse and through notices by his contemporaries, the outline is clear: a chorister disciplined into form, a farmer tested by chance, and a poet of husbandry who set the English year to rhyme.

Our collection contains 7 quotes who is written by Thomas, under the main topics: Health - Christmas - Family - Money - Spring.

Thomas Tusser Famous Works