He was elected to King's College, Cambridge, in 1543, a date which has fixed the earliest limit of his birth-year, as he would have been ineligible at nineteen. From King's College he moved to Trinity Hall, and on leaving Cambridge went to court in the service of William, 1st Baron Paget of Beaudesart, as a musician. After ten years of life at court, he married and settled as a farmer at Cattiwade, Suffolk, near the river Stour, where he wrote his Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie. He never remained long in one place. For his wife's health he removed to Ipswich. After her death he married again, and farmed for some time at West Dereham. He then became a singing man in Norwich Cathedral, where he found a good patron in the dean, John Salisbury.
After another experiment in farming at Fairsted, Essex, he moved once again to London, whence he was driven by the plague of 1572-1573 to find refuge at Trinity Hall, being matriculated as a servant of the college in 1573. At the time of his death he was in possession of a small estate at Chesterton, Cambridgeshire, and his will proves that he was not, as has sometimes been stated, in poverty of any kind, but had in some measure the thrift he preached. Thomas Fuller says he "traded at large in oxen, sheep, dairies, grain of all kinds, to no profit"; that he "spread his bread with all sorts of butter, yet none would stick thereon." He died on May 3rd, 1580. An erroneous inscription at Manningtree, Essex, asserts that he was sixty-five years old.
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