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.