granted the bishop of Ely a fair there, and in 1319–1320 John of Hotham, a later bishop, received licence to hold a fair on the vigil and day of Ascension and for twenty days following. The markets are claimed by an undated charter by the bishop, who also continues to hold the fairs. In 1295 Ely sent two members to parliament, but has never been represented since.
See C. W. Stubbs, Ely Cathedral (London, 1897); Victoria County History, Cambridgeshire.
ELYOT, SIR THOMAS (c. 1490–1546), English diplomatist and
scholar. His father, Sir Richard Elyot (d. 1522), who held considerable
estates in Wiltshire, was made (1503) serjeant-at-law
and attorney-general to the queen consort, and soon afterwards
was commissioned to act as justice of assize on the western
circuit, becoming in 1513 judge of common pleas. Thomas was
the son of his first marriage with Alice Fynderne, but neither the
date nor place of his birth is accurately known. Anthony à
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” read to him Galen and some other authors. In 1511
he accompanied his father on the western circuit as clerk to the
assize, and he held this position until 1528. In addition to his
father’s lands in Wiltshire and Oxfordshire he inherited in 1523
the Cambridge estates of his cousin, Thomas Fynderne. His
title was disputed, but Wolsey decided in his favour, and also
made him clerk of the privy council. Elyot, in a letter addressed
to Thomas Cromwell, says that he never received the emoluments
of this office, while the barren honour of knighthood conferred
on him when he was displaced in 1530 merely put him to further
expense. In that year he sat on the commission appointed to
inquire into the Cambridgeshire estates of his former patron,
Cardinal Wolsey. He married Margaret Barrow, who is described
(Stapleton, Vita Thomae Mori, p. 59, ed. 1558) as a student in
the “school” of Sir Thomas More.
In 1531 he produced the Boke named the Governour, dedicated to King Henry VIII. The work advanced him in the king’s favour, and in the close of the year he received instructions to proceed to the court of the emperor Charles V. to induce him to take a more favourable view of Henry’s projected divorce from Catherine of Aragon. With this was combined another commission, on which one of the king’s agents, Stephen Vaughan, was already engaged. He was, if possible, to apprehend William Tyndale. It is probable that Elyot was suspected, as Vaughan certainly was, of lukewarmness in carrying out the king’s wishes, but this has not prevented his being much abused by Protestant writers. As ambassador Elyot had been involved in ruinous expense, and on his return he wrote to Thomas Cromwell, begging to be excused from serving as sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire, on the score of his poverty. The request was not granted. He was one of the commissioners in the inquiry instituted by Cromwell prior to the suppression of the monasteries, but he did not obtain any share of the spoils. There is little doubt that his known friendship for Thomas More militated against his chances of success, for in a letter addressed to Cromwell he admitted his friendship for More, but protested that he rated higher his duty to the king. William Roper, in his Life of More, says that Elyot was on a second embassy to Charles V., in the winter of 1535–1536, when he received at Naples the news of More’s execution. He had been kept in the dark by his own government, but heard the news from the emperor. The story of an earlier embassy to Rome (1532), mentioned by Burnet, rests on a late endorsement of instructions dated from that year, which cannot be regarded as authoritative. In 1542 he represented the borough of Cambridge in parliament. He had purchased from Cromwell the manor of Carleton in Cambridgeshire, where he died on the 26th of March 1546.
Sir Thomas Elyot received little reward for his services to the state, but his scholarship and his books were held in high esteem by his contemporaries. The Boke named the Governour was printed by Thomas Berthelet (1531, 1534, 1536, 1544, &c.). It is a treatise on moral philosophy, intended to direct the education of those destined to fill high positions, and to inculcate those moral principles which alone could fit them for the performance of their duties. The subject was a favourite one in the 16th century, and the book, which contained many citations from classical authors, was very popular. Elyot expressly acknowledges his obligations to Erasmus’s Institutio Principis Christiani; but he makes no reference to the De regno et regis institutione of Francesco Patrizzi (d. 1494), bishop of Gaeta, on which his work was undoubtedly modelled. As a prose writer, Elyot enriched the English language with many new words. In 1534 he published The Castell of Helth, a popular treatise on medicine, intended to place a scientific knowledge of the art within the reach of those unacquainted with Greek. This work, though scoffed at by the faculty, was appreciated by the general public, and speedily went through many editions. His Latin Dictionary, the earliest comprehensive dictionary of the language, was completed in 1538. The copy of the first edition in the British Museum contains an autograph letter from Elyot to Thomas Cromwell, to whom it originally belonged. It was edited and enlarged in 1548 by Thomas Cooper, bishop of Winchester, who called it Bibliotheca Eliotae, and it formed the basis in 1565 of Cooper’s Thesaurus linguae Romanae et Britannicae.
Elyot’s translations include:—The Doctrinal of Princes (1534), from Isocrates; Cyprianus, A Swete and Devoute Sermon of Holy Saynt Ciprian of the Mortalitie of Man (1534); Rules of a Christian Life (1534), from Pico della Mirandola; The Education or Bringing up of Children (c. 1535), from Plutarch; and Howe one may take Profite of his Enymes (1535), from the same author is generally attributed to him. He also wrote: The Knowledge which maketh a Wise Man and Pasquyll the Playne (1533); The Bankette of Sapience (1534), a collection of moral sayings; Preservative agaynste Deth (1545), which contains many quotations from the Fathers; Defence of Good Women (1545). His Image of Governance, compiled of the Actes and Sentences notable of the most noble Emperor Alexander Severus (1540) professed to be a translation from a Greek MS. of the emperor’s secretary Encolpius (or Eucolpius, as Elyot calls him), which had been lent him by a gentleman of Naples, called Pudericus, who asked to have it back before the translation was complete. In these circumstances Elyot, as he asserts in his preface, supplied the other maxims from different sources. He was violently assailed by Humphrey Hody and later by William Wotton for putting forward a pseudo-translation; but Mr H. H. S. Croft has discovered that there was a Neapolitan gentleman at that time bearing the name of Poderico, or, Latinized, Pudericus, with whom Elyot may well have been acquainted. Roger Ascham mentions his De rebus memorabilibus Angliae; and Webbe quotes a few lines of a lost translation of the Ars poëtica of Horace.
A learned edition of the Governour (2 vols., 1880), by H. H. S. Croft, contains, besides copious notes, a valuable glossary of 16th century English words.
ELYRIA, a city and the county-seat of Lorain county, Ohio,
U.S.A., on the Black river, 8 m. from Lake Erie, and about
25 m. W.S.W. of Cleveland. Pop. (1890) 5611; (1900) 8791,
of whom 1397 were foreign-born; (1910 census) 14,825. It
is served by the Baltimore & Ohio, and the Lake Shore & Michigan
Southern railways. Elyria is about 720 ft. above sea-level,
and lies at the junction of the two forks of the Black river,
each of which falls about 50 ft. here, furnishing water-power.
Among the city’s manufactures are oxide of tin and other
chemicals, iron and steel, leather goods, automobiles and bicycles,
electrical and telephone supplies, butted tubing, gas engines,
screws and bolts, silk, lace and hosiery. In 1905 the city’s
factory products were valued at $2,933,450—140.2% more
than their value in 1900. Flagging, building-stones and
grindstones, taken from quarries in the vicinity (known as the
Berea Grit quarries), are shipped from Elyria in large quantities.
Elyria was founded about 1819 by Heman Ely, in whose honour
it was named; it was selected as the site for the county seat
in 1823, and was chartered as a city in 1892.
ELYSIUM, in Greek mythology, the Elysian fields, the abode
of the righteous after their removal from earth. In Homer
(Od. iv. 563) this region is a plain at the farthest end of the
earth on the banks of the river Oceanus, where the fair-haired
