Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 06.djvu/223

 Brancastre represented Chelmsford. He died 4 Feb. 1699-1700.

 BRANCASTRE or BRAMCESTRE, JOHN (d. 1218), is included among the keepers of the great seal by Sir T. D. Hardy, under the dates of 1203 and 1205; but Mr. Foss gives reasons for believing that the subscriptions to charters supposed to be attached by him as keeper were only affixed in the capacity of a deputy, or a clerk in the exchequer or in the chancery. His signature is found attesting documents from 1200 to 1208. In 1200 or the following year he was made archdeacon of Worcester, in November 1204 was sent to Flanders on the king's service, and on 13 Jan. 1207 was commissioned by King John to take charge of the abbey of Ramsey during a vacancy in the abbacy, and in his capacity of administrator paid thence, in May of the same year, 97l. into the exchequer. In the following October he was rewarded by the king (who exercised the right of presentation during the vacancy in the abbacy) with the vicarage of the parish which was doubtless his birthplace, Brancaster in Norfolk, and on 29 May 1208 was appointed prebendary of Lidington in the church of Lincoln. He died in 1218. One of his name, probably the same, appears as party in several lawsuits in Hertfordshire and Sussex in 1199.

 BRANCH, THOMAS (fl. 1753), was author of 'Thoughts on Dreaming' (1738), and ' Principia Legis et Æquitatis' (1753). The latter work, which presents in alphabetical order a collection of maxims, definitions, and remarkable sayings in law and equity, has been highly commended as a student's text-book; it has found editors both in this country and in the United States. Nothing is known of Branch's personal history, but if the 'lady of Thomas Branch, Esq.' in the obituary of the 'Gentleman's Magazine,' December 1769, was his wife, it may be presumed that he was then alive.

 BRANCKER or BRANKER, THOMAS (1633–1676), mathematician, born at Barnstaple in August 1633, was the son of another Thomas Brancker, a graduate of Exeter College, Oxford, who was in 1626 a schoolmaster near Ilchester, and about 1630 head-master of the Barnstaple High School. The family originally bore the name of Brouncker [see ]. Young Brancker matriculated at his father's college 8 Nov. 1652; proceeded B.A. 15 June 1655, and was elected a probationer fellow of Exeter 30 June 1655, and full fellow 10 July 1656. After taking his master's degree (22 April 1658), he took to preaching, but he refused to conform to the ceremonies of the church of England, and was deprived of his fellowship 4 June 1663. He then retired to Cheshire, changed his views, and applied for and obtained episcopal ordination. He became a 'minister' at Whitegate, Cheshire, but his fame as a mathematician reached William, lord Brereton, who gave him the rectory of Tilston, near Malpas, in 1668. He resigned the benefice (after a very few months' occupation) and became head-master of the grammar school at Macclesfield, where he died in November 1676. He was buried in Macclesfield church, and the inscription on his monument states that he was a linguist as well as a mathematician, chemist, and natural philosopher, and that he pursued his studies 'under the auspices of the Hon. Robert Boyle.'

Brancker gained his first knowledge of mathematics and chemistry from Peter Sthael of Strasburg, 'a noted chimist and Rosicrucian,' who before 1660 settled in Oxford as a private tutor, at the suggestion of Robert Boyle, and numbered Ralph Bathurst, Christopher Wren, with Brancker, Wood, and other less eminent men, among his pupils ('s Autobiog. in Athenæ, Bliss, i. liii). Brancker's earliest publication was 'Doctrinæ Sphæricæ Adumbratio unà cum usu Globorum Artificialium,' Oxford, 1662. In 1668 he published a translation of an introduction to algebra from the High Dutch of Rhenanus, and added a 'Table of odd numbers less than one hundred thousand, shewing those that are incomposit, and resolving the rest into their factors or coefficients.' The book was licensed 18 May 1665, but the publication was delayed to enable Dr. John Peel to add notes and corrections. John Collins, another mathematician, also gave Brancker some assistance over the book, and praised it highly in a letter to James Gregory in 1668. The value of the table and translation is acknowledged in an early paper in the 'Philosophical Transactions' (No. 35, pp. 688-9), and the table and preface were reprinted by Francis Maseres