[1] From a Gloucestershire family, Codrington was elected a demy of Magdalen College, Oxford, 29 July 1619, at the age of 17, and took the degree of M.A.
In May 1641 he was imprisoned by the House of Commons for publishing an elegy on the Earl of Strafford.
His best known work was the Life and Death of Robert, Earl of Essex, London 1646, reprinted in the Harleian Miscellany; Anthony Wood regarded it as a partisan parliamentarian work.
He wrote also the following works:[2] Translated from French:[2] Translated from Latin:[2] He was also the author of the Life of Aesop in French and Latin, prefixed to Thomas Philipot's Aesop's Fables (1666), and translated The Troublesome and Hard Adventures in Love (1652), attributed to Miguel de Cervantes.
[2] Codrington's English works were:[2] The Happy Mind, or a compendious direction to attain to the same, London, 1640, is attributed to him, and the following poems: Seneca's Book of Consolation to Marcia, translated into an English poem, 1635 (Hazlitt); An Elegy to the Memory of Margaret, Lady Smith (Hazlitt); and An Elegy to the Memory of Elizabeth, Lady Ducey (manuscript, Hazlitt).