Successively a musician, schoolmaster, serving man, husbandman, grazier, and poet; born at Rivenhall, Essex, England, about 1515; educated at Eton and at Cambridge. Died in London about Apr., 1580. He was the author of “Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, united to as many of Good Housewifery, etc.” (1573), in verse, with a metrical autobiography. His book is chiefly valuable for its picture of the manners and domestic life of English farmers.

Good Husbandry, 1573

  Whether he bought or sold, he lost; and, when a renter, impoverished himself and never enriched his landlord. Yet hath he laid down excellent rules in his “Book of Husbandry and Houswifery,” (so that the observer thereof must be rich) in his own defence.

  It must be acknowledged, that this old English georgic has much more of the simplicity of Hesiod, than of the elegance of Virgil: and a modern reader would suspect, that many of its salutary maxims originally decorated the margins, and illustrated the calendars, of an ancient almanac. It is without invocations, digressions, and descriptions: no pleasing pictures of rural imagery are drawn from meadows covered with flocks, and fields waving with corn, nor are Pan and Ceres once named. Yet it is valuable, as a genuine picture of the agriculture, the rural arts, and the domestic economy and customs, of our industrious ancestors.

  There is nowhere to be found excepting perhaps in Swift’s “Directions to Servants,” evidence of such rigid and minute attention to every department of domestic economy…. Although neither beauty of description nor elegance of diction was Tusser’s object, he has frequently attained, what better indeed suited his purpose, a sort of homely, pointed and quaint expression, like that of the old English proverb, which the rhyme and the alliteration tend to fix on the memory of the reader.

  The great merit of Tusser’s book, independent of the utility of its agricultural precepts, consists in the faithful picture which it delineates of the manners, customs, and domestic life of the English farmer, and in the morality, piety, and benevolent simplicity which pervade the whole. In a poetical light its pretensions are not great.

  Such was the ancient farmer’s year, which Tusser has described with wonderful spirit, even to the minutest detail, and such were the operations of husbandry that the boy Shakspere would have beheld with interest amidst his native corn-fields and pastures.

  Tusser’s versification, however, is curiously elaborate for the time when he wrote. Warton has pointed this out. His rhythm also seems to be always good, and his language free from inversions; two merits that have probably gone far in insuring his permanent popularity among the class for which he wrote.

  Good, honest, homely, useful old rhymer.

  The precepts of Tusser are excellent, and show very much cool collected sense.

  Tusser’s strength may have been in high farming, it was not in high poetry. Nevertheless, there is a musical sententiousness in his terse rhymes, and an air of business about them; his Pegasus tugged over the clods with his shoulder well up to the collar, and the maxims were in a form likely to ensure for them wide currency among the people.

  He is our only, or almost our only, English Georgic poet, and his poetry frankly acquiesces in doggerel.