Thomas coryate biography

​CORYATE, THOMAS (1577?–1617), traveller, son of the Rev. George Coryate [q.

Thomas coryate biography

v.], rector of Odcombe, Somersetshire, by Gertrude his wife, was born in the parsonage house at Odcombe, about 1577, and entered at Gloucester Hall in the university of Oxford in 1596. He left the university without taking a degree, and appears to have led an aimless life for a few years, till, on the accession of James I, he became a hanger-on of the court, picking up a precarious livelihood as a kind of privileged buffoon.

Gifted with an extraordinary memory, and being no contemptible scholar, with what Fuller calls ‘an admirable fluency in the Greek tongue,’ and a certain sort of ability which occasionally showed itself in very pungent repartee, and an appearance which must have been indescribably comic, he soon attracted notice, ‘indeed was the courtiers' anvil to try their wits upon; and sometimes this anvil returned the hammers as