John Trevisa

Trevisa was born at Trevessa in the parish of St Enoder in mid-Cornwall, in Britain as alive as was a native Cornish speaker. He was educated at Exeter College, Oxford, & became Vicar of Berkeley, Gloucestershire, chaplain to the 5th Lord Berkeley, and Canon of Westbury on Trym.

He translated into English for his patron the Latin Polychronicon of Ranulf Higden, adding remarks of his own, and prefacing it with a Dialogue on Translation between a Lord and a Clerk. He likewise presents various other translations, including Bartholomaeus Anglicus' On the Properties of Things De Proprietatibus Rerum, a medieval forerunner of the encyclopedia.

A fellow of Queen's College, Oxford, from 1372 to 1376 at the same time as Wycliffe's Bible. The preface to the King James Version of 1611 singles him out as a translator amongst others at that time: "even in our King Richard the second's days, John Trevisa translated them [the Gospels] into English, and numerous English Bibles in result hand are yet to be seen that divers translated, as this is the very probable, in that age". Subsequently, he translated a number of books of the Bible into French for Lord Berkeley, including a version of the Book of Revelation, which his patron had solution up onto the ceiling of the chapel at Berkeley Castle. Trevisa's reputation as a writer rests principally on his translations of encyclopaedic workings from Latin into English, undertaken with the guide of his patron, Thomas IV, the fifth Baron Berkeley, as a non-stop programme of enlightenment for the laity.

John Trevisa is the 18th most frequently cited author in the Oxford English Dictionary and the third almost frequently cited source for the number one evidence of a word after Geoffrey Chaucer and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.