Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 17.djvu/353

Elyot and respected, not only by those of his own persuasion, but by most others: who never durst utter anything unbecoming a christian in his presence’ (Church Hist. ii. 71).

[Wood's Athenæ Oxon. (Bliss), i. 739, Fasti, i. 153; Fuller's Church Hist. (Brewer), iv. 241; Gillow's Bibl. Dict.; Foley's Records, iv. 370, 453; Strype's Cranmer, p. 389, folio; Wood's Annals (Gutch), pp. 126, 143; Wood's Colleges and Halls (Gutch), pp. 538, 543.]  ELYOT, RICHARD (1450?–1522), judge, was son of Simon Elyot, and grandson of Michell Elyot. The family was closely associated with Coker, near Yeovil, Somersetshire. His mother was Joan, daughter of John Bryce, alias Basset. He was practising as an advocate in 1492; from 1498 to July 1511 he occupied, as receiver for the crown, the manor of Wansborough, Wiltshire, the forfeited estate of Francis, lord Lovell, attainted in 1485. He was commissioner for the collection of an aid in Wiltshire in 1503, and in Michaelmas of that year became a serjeant-at-law, and soon afterwards attorney-general to the queen. Before this time he married his first wife, Alice Fynderne, niece of Sir Thomas Fynderne, who was executed in 1460, and granddaughter of Sir William Fynderne of Childrey, Berkshire (d. 1440). He acted as judge of assize on the western circuit from the opening years of the century; was in the commission of the peace for Cornwall in 1509; was appointed judge of the common pleas, 26 April 1513, and was knighted before 1517. He was summoned to the first three parliaments of Henry VIII's reign; helped to arbitrate with Wolsey and others in a land suit between the corporation of Norwich and the convent of Christchurch, and took part in the preliminary investigation into the charges against Edward Stafford, duke of Buckingham, in 1521. Elyot died after February 1522. His will, proved 26 May following, directs his body to be buried in Salisbury Cathedral, near which he owned property, but it is not known if this direction was carried out. By his first wife Elyot had two children, the famous Sir Thomas Elyot [q. v.], and Marjory, wife of Robert, son of Sir George Puttenham of Sherfield, near Basingstoke. About 1512 Elyot married his second wife, Elizabeth, widow of Richard Fetiplace, and daughter and heiress of William Besilles, through whom he acquired property in Berkshire and Oxfordshire. His will contains many small bequests to religious foundations throughout England.

[Mr. H. H. S. Crofts's full memoir of Sir Thomas Elyot prefixed to his edition of the Governour (1883), gives all accessible information respecting Sir Richard. His will is printed by Mr. Crofts, i. 309–16.]  ELYOT, THOMAS (1490?–1546), diplomatist and author, only son of Sir Richard Elyot [q. v.], by his first wife, Alice Fynderne, was born before 1490. He was doubtless a native of Wiltshire, where his father held estates at Wansborough, Chalk, and Winterslow. According to his own account (Dict. pref.) he was educated at home, but his knowledge of Latin and Greek clearly dated from an early age. The tradition that he was a graduate either of St. Mary Hall, Oxford, or Jesus College, Cambridge, is unsupported by documentary evidence. A Thomas Eliett, or Eyllyott, of St. Mary Hall, was admitted B.A. in June 1518, and B.C.L. 26 Aug. 1523 (Oxf. Univ. Reg. Oxf. Hist. Soc. i. 104, 131). Thomas Baker claims Elyot for Jesus College, Cambridge, and says that he proceeded M.A. there in 1506–7. But the name is not an uncommon one, and the dates of all these degrees fail to harmonise with better ascertained facts in Elyot's career. Before he was twenty he read with ‘a worshipful physician’ (probably Linacre) the works of Galen and other medical writers (Castle of Helth, pref.). In 1509 he accompanied his father on a visit to Ivy Church, where a gigantic skeleton had been unearthed (, Collect. iv. 141). In 1511 he became clerk of assize on the western circuit, where his father was judge. The deaths of his father in 1522 and of Thomas Fynderne, a young cousin on his mother's side, in 1523, put him in possession of much landed property, including the estates of Combe (now Long Combe), near Woodstock, and the manors of Calton Parva and West Colvile, Cambridgeshire. Elyot made Combe his chief residence, and was in the commission of the peace for Oxfordshire in July 1522. Before 1523 he attracted the notice of Cardinal Wolsey, who, unsolicited, gave him in that year the post of clerk of the privy council, but his patron neglected to provide for the payment of any salary. In November 1527 Elyot was sheriff of Oxfordshire and Berkshire, and in that capacity wrote to Thomas Cromwell (25 March 1527–1528) on some business which concerned the cardinal. This letter, in which Elyot suggests that Cromwell should visit him at Combe, is the first sign of an intimacy which increased rapidly in the following years. In 1528 he resigned the clerkship of assize, and in June 1530 was deprived of the clerkship of the council. He ‘was discharged,’ he writes, ‘without any recompense, rewarded only with the order of knighthood,