Background
Sir Thomas Elyot was born in 1490 in Wiltshire, United Kingdom. Thomas was the child of Sir Richard Elyot's first marriage with Alice De la Mare, but neither the date nor place of his birth is accurately known.
Sir Thomas Elyot was born in 1490 in Wiltshire, United Kingdom. Thomas was the child of Sir Richard Elyot's first marriage with Alice De la Mare, but neither the date nor place of his birth is accurately known.
Anthony Wood claimed him as an alumnus of St Mary Hall, Oxford, while C. H. Cooper in the Athenae Cantabrigienses put in a claim for Jesus College, Cambridge. Elyot himself says in the preface to his Dictionary that he was educated under the paternal roof, and was from the age of twelve his own tutor. He supplies, in the introduction to his Castell of Helth, a list of the authors he had read in philosophy and medicine, adding that a "worshipful physician" (Thomas Linacre) read to him from Galen and some other authors.
A member of Sir Thomas More’s circle, Elyot was suspected of being out of sympathy with Henry VIII’s plan to divorce Catherine of Aragon and probably owed his lack of advancement to his friendship with More. In 1531 he published The Boke Named the Governour, dedicated to the king, and that autumn went as the king’s envoy to the court of the Holy Roman emperor Charles V.
Elyot’s very popular Governour, a plan for the upbringing of gentlemen’s sons who were to bear authority in the realm, was the first important treatise on education in English and did much to form the later English ideal of the gentleman. His Castel of Helth was a popular regimen of health that, written in the vernacular and by a layman (although he had received some instruction in medicine), incurred censure but was widely read. His Dictionary, the first English dictionary of Classical Latin, was published in 1538. The aim of all Elyot’s works was usefulness: he brought classics and Italian authors to the general public through his translations, he provided practical instruction in his own writings, and he added many new words to the English language.
He married Margaret à Barrow, described as a student in the "school" of Sir Thomas More. They had three children, named John (1516), Thomas (1529), and Richard (1537).