The Commodities of Husbandrie

Thomas Tusser and the art of keeping house

Frontispiece to A New Orchard and Garden by William Lawson, 1618 (Project Gutenberg)

Thomas Tusser (c. 1524–1580) was a popular church singer, a farmer, a student at Eton and Cambridge — and a poet: a much-read Elizabethan. He was, in fact, as close to a bestselling poet as his age knew, with his 1557 A Hundred Good Pointes of Husbandrie (expanded in 157…