George Turberville

Who was George Turberville?

George Turberville, or Turbervile was an English poet, second son of Henry Turberville of Winterborne Whitechurch, Dorset, and nephew of James Turberville, Bishop of Exeter. The Turbervilles were an old Dorsetshire family, the inspiration for the d'Urbervilles of Thomas Hardy's novel, Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

Turberville became a scholar of Winchester College in 1554, and in 1561 was made a fellow of New College, Oxford. In 1562 he began to study law in London, and gained a reputation, according to Anthony à Wood, as a poet and man of affairs. He accompanied Thomas Randolph on a special mission to Moscow to the court of Ivan the Terrible in 1568. Of his Poems describing the Places and Manners of the Country and People of Russia mentioned by Wood, only three metrical letters describing his adventures survive, and these were reprinted in Hakluyt's Voyages.

His Epitaphs, Epigrams, Songs and Sonnets appeared "newly corrected with additions" in 1567. In the same year he published translations of the Heroycall Epistles of Ovid, and of the Eglogs of Mantuan, and in 1568 A Plaine Path to Perfect Vertue from Dominicus Mancinus.