- by Caxton.
- A translation of Bartholomew de Glanville, ‘De Proprietatibus Rerum,’ which he finished at Berkeley on 6 Feb. 1398, ‘the yere of my lord's age 47.’ This translation was printed by Wynkyn de Worde probably in 1495, and by Berthelet in 1535. Stephen Batman [q. v.] produced a revised version in 1582, with which Shakespeare was probably familiar.
- Translation of a sermon by Richard FitzRalph against the mendicant friars (St. John's College, Cambridge, MS. H. 1; Addit. MS. 24194, and Harleian, 1900).
- ‘The Begynning of the Worlde and the Rewmes betwixe of Folkis and the ende of Worldes,’ a translation of a spurious tract of Methodius (Harleian MS. 1900).
- Vegetius ‘De re Militari;’ a translation of this work made for Thomas, lord Berkeley, in 1408 is in Digby MS. 233 in the Bodleian Library, and is probably by Trevisa.
- Ægidius ‘De Regimine Principum,’ a translation contained in Digby MS. 233, and reasonably ascribed to Trevisa.
- A translation of Nicodemus de Passione Christi, Additional MS. 16165 at British Museum; written, like other translations, at the request of Lord Berkeley. Dr. Babington ascribes to Trevisa the translation of the ‘Dialogus inter Militem et Clericum de potestate ecclesiastica et civili’ (a Latin tract inaccurately attributed to William Ockham [q. v.]), which was published at London in 1540.
Trevisa is also credited by Caxton with a translation of the Bible. Archbishop Ussher quotes a genealogy of King David of Scotland as by Trevisa. Other works attributed to Trevisa by Bale, as ‘Gesta Regis Arthuri,’ &c., are probably only portions of the ‘Polychronicon.’
[Boase and Courtney's Bibl. Cornub. ii. 795; Tanner's Bibl. Brit.-Hib. pp. 720–1; Ames's Typogr. Antiq. ed. Herbert; Blades's Life of Caxton, i. 195, ii. 124–5; Prefaces to Rolls Series edition of Higden's Polychronicon, i. pp. liii–lxiii, and iii. p. xxviii; Hist. MSS. Comm. 1st Rep. p. 60, 2nd Rep. pp. 128–9, 140–1, 3rd Rep. p. 424, 6th Rep. p. 234; Boase's Register of Exeter College, pp. 11–12 (Oxf. Hist. Soc.).]
TREVITHICK, RICHARD (1771–1833), ‘the father of the locomotive engine,’ the only son of Richard Trevithick, by his wife Anne Teague (d. 1810) of Redruth, was born at Illogan in the west of Cornwall on 13 April 1771. The elder Richard Trevithick, who was born in 1735, became manager of Dolcoath mine, where he constructed a deep adit in 1765, and where he erected a Newcomen engine ten years later. He continued manager of the four important mines, Dolcoath, Wheal Chance, Wheal Treasury, and Eastern Stray Parks, until his death at Penponds, near Camborne, on 1 Aug. 1797. John Wesley often visited him during his visits to Cornwall; and for the last twenty years of his life Trevithick was a methodist class leader. Between 1782 and 1785, as manager of Dolcoath, he came into contact with the eccentric adventurer Rudolph Eric Raspe [q. v.]
Young Trevithick was brought up amid the clash of rival opinions as to the respective merits of the old school of Cornish engineers [see Hornblower, Jonathan] and innovators such as Smeaton and Watt. The arrival of the Soho engineers in Cornwall in 1777 had proved the source of much discord, and the ingenuity of Cornishmen was exercised during the next twenty years in attempts to discover the means of evading Boulton and Watt's patents. From 1780 to 1799 the ablest of Watt's assistants, William Murdock [q. v.], was residing at Redruth, within a few miles of Trevithick's home, and there is little doubt that from him and from pupils of the Hornblowers, such as William Bull, the youthful Trevithick derived an insight into the first principles of the steam engine. When not playing truant, Trevithick was educated at Camborne school, but he was not a favourite with the master, whom he once put in a dilemma by offering to do six sums to the pedagogue's one. Many stories are current in Cornwall of his inventive genius and his quickness at figures when a boy, and of his herculean strength as a young man. He was one of the most powerful west-country wrestlers of his day, and at South Kensington is still to be seen a smith's tool, called a mandril, weighing ten hundredweight, which he was in the habit of lifting when a stripling of eighteen. As early as 1795 Trevithick was receiving pay for the saving of fuel by improvements in an engine at Wheal Treasury mine. At the time of his father's death, in 1797, he was engineer at Ding Dong mine, near Penzance, trying to effect improvements in the engine model invented by William Bull, and he set up one of Bull's engines with his improvements at the Herland mine in rivalry with one of Watt's best engines. Shortly afterwards he effected an improvement in the plunger pump, an indispensable adjunct to mines the depth of which was continually on the increase; and this was three years later developed by him into a double-acting water-pressure engine, being a perfected form of the machine first projected more than a century previously by Sir Samuel Morland [q. v.] One of these engines, erected in 1804 at Alport mines, near Bakewell, Derbyshire, was working down to 1852.
