ELYOT, SIR THOMAS (c. English diplomat and scholar. His father was Sir Richard Elyot, judge of common pleas. The date and place of his birth are not known. Nor is the place of his education; both St. Mary Hall, Oxford and Jesus college, Cambridge, claim him, while he himself says in the preface to his Dictionary that he was educated at home, and from the age of 12 taught himself. In 1511 he accompanied his father as clerk of assize on the western circuit ; later Wolsey made him clerk to the Privy Council. In 153o he was displaced and knighted. He married Margaret Barrow, a student in the "school" of Sir Thomas More, and his known friendship with More was after wards a bar to his advancement. In 1S31 he produced the Boke named the Governour, dedicated to Henry VIII. The same year he was sent to the court of Charles V. to further Henry's divorce from Catherine of Aragon, and to attempt to catch William Tyn dale. He served on the commission on the monasteries and on a second embassy to Charles V. in 1535. In 1542 he represented Cambridge in parliament. He died at Carleton in Cambridge shire on March 26, 1546. The Boke named the Governour is a treatise on moral philosophy for the education of princes, and contains many classical quotations. It was very popular. He acknowledges his debt to Erasmus's Institutio Principis Chris tian, but does not mention Patrizzi's De regno et regis institu tions, on which his book was modelled. In 1534 he produced the Castell of Helth, a popular treatise on medicine, ridiculed by the doctors, but widely read. His Latin Dictionary, the first complete one in English, was finished in 1535, and edited and enlarged by Thomas Cooper, Bishop of Winchester, in 1548.
Elyot's translations include:—The Doctrinal of Princes (1534), from Isocrates; Cyprianus, A Swete and Devoute Sermon of Holy Saynt Ciprian of the Mortalitie of Man 0534); Rules of a Christian Life (1534) , from Pico della Mirandola; The Education or Bringing up of Children (c. 1535), from Plutarch; and Howe one may take Profite of his Enymes (1535), from the same author is generally attributed to him. He also wrote: The Knowledge which maketh a Wise Man and Pasquyll the Playne 0533); The Bankette of Sapience (1534), a col lection of moral sayings; Preservative agaynste Deth 0545), which contains many quotations from the Fathers; Defence of Good Women • His Image of Governance, compiled of the Actes and Sen tences notable of the most noble Emperor Alexander Severus (1540) professed to be a translation from a Greek MS. of the emperor's sec retary Encolpius (or Eucolpius, as Elyot calls him), which had been lent him by a gentleman of Naples, called Pudericus, who asked to have it back before the translation was complete. In these circum stances Elyot, as he asserts in his preface, supplied the other maxims from different sources. He was violently assailed by Humphrey Hody and later by William Wotton for putting forward a pseudo-transla tion ; but Mr. H. H. S. Croft has discovered that there was a Neapoli tan gentleman at that time bearing the name of Poderico, or, Latinized, Pudericus, with whom Elyot may well have been acquainted. Roger Ascham mentions his De rebus memorabilibus Angliae; and Webbe quotes a few lines of a lost translation of the Ars poetica of Horace. A learned edition of the Governour (2 vols., 188o), by H. H. S. Croft, contains, besides copious notes, a valuable glossary of 16th century English words.