[1] He received a good education, and, having speedily dissipated at court the money with which his father provided him, he entered the household of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey.
In the Scottish campaign of 1547 he was present at the barren victory of Pinkie, and in the next year was taken prisoner at Saint Monance, but aided by his persuasive tongue he escaped to the English garrison at Lauder, where he was once more besieged, only returning to England on the conclusion of peace in 1550.
He was not released at the Peace of Cateau Cambrésis for lack of money to pay his ransom, but he was finally set free on giving his bond for the amount, an engagement which he repudiated as soon as he was safely in England.
He therefore returned to active service under Lord Grey, who was in command of an English army sent in 1560 to help the Scottish rebels at the Siege of Leith, and in 1564 he served in Ireland under Sir Henry Sidney.
The religious disturbances in the Netherlands attracted him to Antwerp, where, as the agent of William of Orange, he allowed the insurgents to place him at their head, and was able to save much property from destruction.
On Good Friday, 8 April 1580, Churchyard (then aged nearly 60) published a short account of the earthquake which had struck London and much of England only two days earlier.
The pamphlet, A Warning to the Wyse, a Feare to the Fond, a Bridle to the Lewde, and a Glasse to the Good; written of the late Earthquake chanced in London and other places, 6 April 1580, for the Glory of God and benefit of men, that warely can walk, and wisely judge.
A short and seemingly alliterative poem in the manner of Piers Plowman, Davie Dicar brought Churchyard into trouble with the privy council, but he was supported by Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset and dismissed with a reprimand.
In a verse dedication to John Stow's Pithy Pleasaunt and Profitable Workes (1568), Churchyard defended the native tradition, grounding it in "Peers plowman .
This is the concluding event in a list of disasters caused by corrupt elites, a part of Piers Plowman that was appreciated by some English Protestants in the mid-sixteenth century.
Churchyard turns Davy into a Piers-like truth-teller and prophet of a millennial kingdom of justice: When truth doth tread the strets and liers lurke in den, And Rex doth raigne and rule the rost, and weedes out wicked men: Then baleful barnes be blyth that here in England wonne, Your strife shall stynt I undertake, your dredfull dayes ar done.
William Waterman added to the debate with his Westerne Wyll, calling explicit attention to Davy's roots: This Diker sems a thryving ladde, brought up in pieres scole The plowman stoute, of whom I thynke ye have often harde.
Francis Meres (Palladis Tamia, 1598) mentions him in conjunction with many great names among "the most passionate, among us, to bewail and bemoan the perplexities of love".
JP Collier, 1870), of the Worthines of Wales (Spenser Soc., 1876), and a notice of Churchyard by H. W. Adnitt (Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, reprinted separately 1884).