Richard Hooker was born in or near Exeter in April 1554, less than six years before the accession of Elizabeth I and the reestablishment by statute of the religious and political order for which he himself was to attempt a coherent intellectual justification some forty years later. At an early age he came to the attention of John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, the first official defender of the English church in Elizabeth's reign. With Jewel's support, Hooker attended Oxford, where he became a Fellow of Corpus Christi College in 1579 and taught logic and Hebrew.

Hooker was made a deacon in 1579 and later ordained to the priesthood. In 1585 his appointment as Master of the Temple made him chief pastor of one of the principal centers of legal studies in London. Enough sermons survive from this period of his life to form the basis for a substantial volume in the Folger edition. However, Hooker's chief work – indeed, the chief English prose work of the sixteenth century – was Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: Eight Books.

Hooker gave up his place at the Temple to work on the Laws in 1591 and resided for the next few years in the home of his father-inlaw, the London merchant John Churchman. He consulted frequently in the course of writing with two of his former students, Edwin Sandys, son of the Archbishop of York and a member of the parliament of 1593, and George Cranmer, grand-nephew of the martyred Archbishop of Canterbury.