Robert Ashley (1565 – October 1641) was an English lawyer and translator during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, and a Member of Parliament for Dorchester.
"Finding the practice of law", says Wood, "to have ebbs and tides, he applied himself to the learning of the languages of our neighbours, to the end that he might be partaker of the wisdom of those nations, having been many years of this opinion, that as no one soil or territory yieldeth all fruits alike, so no one climate or region affordeth all kind of knowledge in full measure.
[7] Ashley, who translated works during the reigns of Elizabeth, James I, and Charles I of England is called by Wood in his Athenæ Oxonienses "an esquire's son and Wiltshire-man born".
When Ashley was a boy he delighted in reading Bevis of Hampton, Guy of Warwick, Valentine and Orson, Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and later the Decameron of Boccace and the Heptameron of the Queen of Navarre.
[1] His principal works are:[1] Ashley also translated Sebastián Fox Morcillo’s De honore (Basel, 1556) into English as Of Honour, but it was never published.