Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 14.djvu/139

 with camp life and returned to England, when, by the intervention of the Duke of Argyll, with whom she had served in the field, she was presented to Queen Anne, who awarded her a pension of a shilling a day for life. On going to Dublin to visit her friends Christian found that she was unable to make good her claim to the property she had left behind so many years before, and consoled herself for the loss by a marriage with a soldier named Davies. The remaining twenty-five years of her life were spent in obscurity, poverty, and sickness. Davies, by means of his wife's influence, was admitted into the Pensioners' College at Chelsea, and while watching at his bedside during an illness Christian contracted a feverish cold, to which she succumbed in four days on 7 July 1739. She had, however, for many years suffered from a complicated variety of disorders, which included rheumatism, scurvy, and dropsy. At her own request her body was interred among the pensioners in Chelsea burying-ground, and three grand volleys were fired over her grave.

The foregoing account (with the exception of the part relating to Christian Davies's death) is taken from the ‘Life and Adventures of Mrs. Christian Davies’ (1740; reprinted 1741), a book the authorship of which has, on no reasonable grounds, been sometimes attributed to Defoe. It is written throughout in autobiographical form, and on the title-page the contents are stated to have been ‘taken from her own mouth.’ As far as the personal history of Christian Davies is concerned this statement might very well be true; for this portion of the book is uniformly disfigured by the revolting details of many unseemly and brutal acts, related in a tone of self-glorification which is suggestive of nothing so much as of an unsexed woman. But in the book considered as a whole, Christian Davies plays nothing but a very secondary part. It is really a careful narrative of Marlborough's campaigns. It includes much that could not be derived from the heroine, and the dates of her early life are inconsistent with each other. Contemporary evidence is also against the genuineness of the autobiography. Boyer (Political State of Great Britain, lviii. 90) has an entry under date 7 July 1739: ‘Died at Chelsea, Mrs. Christiana Davies, who for several years served as a dragoon undiscovered in the Royal Inniskillen Regiment, but receiving a wound in King William's wars at Aughrim in Ireland, was discovered.’ The paragraph goes on to state that she then married and accompanied her husband into Flanders, but as a wife and not as a brother in arms. This account leaves Christian Davies's glory as a female soldier unimpaired, and, outside of the ‘Life and Adventures,’ there is no reason for doubting its correctness. Henry Wilson, James Caulfield, and other biographers of eccentric persons have unreservedly accepted the autobiographical narrative, but their accounts of Christian Davies are one and all based solely on that work. The sketch of Christian Davies's life given in Cannon's ‘Records of the British Army’ is also derived from the same source.

[Authorities as stated above; the British Heroine, or an Abridgment of the Life and Adventures of Mrs. Christian Davies, commonly called Mother Ross, by J. Wilson, formerly surgeon in the army, London, 1742, is, as the title intimates, simply a slightly abridged version of the anonymous Life and Adventures, written throughout in the third person instead of the first.]  DAVIES, DAVID, D.D. (d. 1819?), writer on poor laws, studied at Jesus College, Oxford, and proceeded B.A. 1778, M.A. 1785, B.D. and D.D. 1800. He was appointed rector of Barkham, Berkshire. Here he occupied himself with inquiries regarding the condition of the labouring poor. These inquiries, dedicated to the board of agriculture, he published as ‘The Case of Labourers in Husbandry stated and considered’ (Bath and London, 1795). The most valuable part of this work is the appendix, which contains a number of minute particulars regarding the wages, food, &c., of the labourers in various districts of England and Scotland. Davies died about 1819.

[Cat. of Oxford Graduates; McCulloch's Lit. of Pol. Econ.]  DAVIES, DAVID CHRISTOPHER (1827–1885), geologist and mining engineer, was born in 1827 at Oswestry, of humble parents, and was entirely self-educated. He was brought up to the trade of an ironmonger, but he acquired an excellent knowledge of the rocks of his native district, and about 1852 he began to practise with considerable success as a mining engineer. He contributed a paper on the ‘Bala Limestone’ to the ‘Proceedings’ of the Liverpool Geological Society for 1865. From this date Davies contributed numerous papers to the ‘Geological Magazine’ on such subjects as the carboniferous limestone of Corwen, the geology of the Vale of Clwyd, the millstone grit of North Wales, phosphate of lime, &c. In an important paper on the phosphorite deposits of North Wales, which appeared in the ‘Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society’ for 1875, Davies gave an account of the discovery and working out under his direction of certain beds of this