Thomas Tusser (c. 1524 – 3 May 1580) was an English poet and farmer, best known for his instructional poem Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, an expanded version of his original title, A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie, first published in 1557. For Tusser the garden was the domain of the housewife, and the 1562 text expands on this theme. Scholars also consider it a text of interest for its defence of enclosures. It was among the best-selling poetry books of the Elizabethan age.

Tusser was born in Rivenhall, Essex, about 1524, the son of William and Isabella Tusser. At a very early age he became a chorister in St Nicholas' Collegiate Chapel in Wallingford Castle, Wallingford, Oxfordshire. He appears to have been pressed for service in the King's Chapel, the choristers of which were usually afterwards placed by the King in one of the Royal Foundations at Oxford or Cambridge but Tusser entered the choir of St. Paul's Cathedral, and from there went to Eton College. He has left a quaint account of his privations at Wallingford, and of the severities of Nicholas Udall at Eton.

He was elected to King's College, Cambridge in 1543, a date which sets the earliest limit of his birth-year, as he would have been ineligible at nineteen. From King's College he moved to Trinity Hall, Cambridge. On leaving Cambridge, he went to court in the service of William Paget, 1st Baron Paget of Beaudesart, as a musician. After ten years of life at court, he married and settled as a farmer at Cattawade, Suffolk, near the River Stour.

There he wrote A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie, a long poem in rhyming couplets recording the country year. This work was first printed in London in 1557 by the publisher Richard Tottel, and was frequently reprinted. Tottel published an enlarged edition Five Hundreth Pointes of Good Husbandrie in 1573. Tusser includes a homely mix of instructions and observations about farming and country customs which offer insight into life in Tudor England, and his work records many terms and proverbs in print for the first time. In this work, he also famously presents ten characteristics the perfect cheese must have:

Not like Gehazi, i.e., dead white, like a leper
Not like Lot's wife, all salt
Not like Argus, full of eyes
Not like Tom Piper, "hoven and puffed"
Not like Crispin, leathery
Not like Lazarus, poor
Not like Esau, hairy
Not like Mary Magdalene, full of whey or maudlin
Not like the Gentiles, full of maggots
Not like a Bishop, made of burnt milk

He never remained long in one place. For the sake of his wife's health he removed to Ipswich. After her death he married again and farmed for some time at West Dereham in Norfolk. He then became a singing man in Norwich Cathedral, where he found a good patron in the Dean, John Salisbury.

Five Hundred Points contains these rhyming couplets:

Swéete April showers,
Doo spring Maie flowers.