Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 14.djvu/237

 site having been allotted to the crown under the act for disafforesting the forest of Hainault (14 & 15 Vict. c. 43), which was passed in 1851. The oak, which measured 36 feet in girth at three feet from the ground, and whose boughs overspread an area of some 300 feet in circumference, was greatly injured by an accidental fire in June 1805. A picture of it as it appeared after this catastrophe will be found in the ‘Gentleman's Magazine’ for 1806, opposite p. 617. The remaining portion of the tree was blown down by a gale in February 1820, and some of the wood was utilised in making the pulpit and reading-desk of St. Pancras Church, which was then in course of erection. A few years before Day's death the oak lost a large limb, out of which he had a coffin made for himself. He also left directions that his body should be conveyed to the grave by water, in consequence of the number of accidents he had met with while travelling on land, and that it should be accompanied by six pump and block makers. Day died on 19 Oct. 1767 in the eighty-fourth year of his age, and was buried in his oak coffin in the churchyard of Barking, Essex. His tombstone was repaired in 1829 at the expense of the Company of Blockmakers.

[The History, Origin, and Rise of Fairlop Fair, &c. (1813); Wilson's Wonderful Characters (1821), ii. 370–5; Granger's Wonderful Museum (1808), vi. 3041–53; The Mirror, ii. 81–2, 131; Chambers's Book of Days (1864), ii. 21–2; Thorne's Handbook to the Environs of London (1876), pt. i. pp. 24–5; Gent. Mag. xxxvii. 525, vol. lxxv. pt. i. p. 574, vol. lxxvi. pt. ii. p. 617; Notes and Queries, 1st ser. v. 113–14, 471–3, 621, 4th ser. v. 468.] 

DAY, FRANCIS (d. 1642), the founder of Madras, is first mentioned in the records of the East India Company as the founder of a factory at Armagaum, a small port in the Nellore district, in 1625. This was the second in date of the English settlements on the eastern or Coromandel coast of India, and soon grew to be next in importance to the English factory at Masulipatam. Both these factories were, however, in much danger both from native powers and from the Dutch, who had settlements close at hand, and in 1638 the East India Company again sent Day to India with special directions to find a spot more suited for the headquarters of their possessions on that coast. After much exploration he fixed upon a site adjoining the Portuguese settlement of St. Thomé, and in 1639 purchased from the Rájá of Chandragiri, on behalf of the company, a tract of land five miles along the coast and one mile inland for the new settlement. In March 1639 he built the factory and protected it with a fort, occupied by a hundred men, to which he gave the name of Fort St. George, which is still the official name of the great city and presidency of Madras. The original fort was only four hundred yards long by a hundred deep, and cost about 3,500l., but it served the purpose of protecting the infant settlement, where its founder, Day, died in 1642.

[Higginbotham's Men whom India has known; Wheeler's Early Records of the Madras Presidency; Mill's Hist. of British India.] 

DAY, GEORGE (1501?–1556), bishop of Chichester, was the third son of Richard Day of Newport in Shropshire. He was educated at Cambridge, where he was chaplain to Bishop Fisher, and public orator (1528). He became master of St. John's College and vice-chancellor in 1537, and in 1538 provost of King's College, by virtue of the king's supreme authority, though he had never been a fellow of that society. About the same time he was presented by the king, one of whose chaplains he was, to the rectory of All Hallows the Great, London (, Athenæ Cantab. i. 156). His name occurs in the commission appointed by Thomas Cromwell in 1540 which drew up in three years the third great doctrinal formulary of the reign of Henry VIII, the ‘Necessary Doctrine and Erudition of a Christian Man;’ and his answers, which he modestly called ‘Opiniones non Assertiones,’ to the preparatory questions that were propounded to the divines engaged on that undertaking are extant (Burnet Coll. iii. No. xxi.). In the convocation of 1542 he was one of the doctors to whom was assigned a portion of the New Testament to translate, in the abortive attempt of the clergy to have a really authorised version of the scriptures, which was quashed by King Henry. Next year he was consecrated bishop of Chichester, with license to hold King's College in commendam for six years; and was associated with Cranmer and Heath in a design for abolishing superstitious ceremonies (, Hist. of the Church of England, ii. 365). In 1545 he occurs as almoner to the queen, and also in a commission to inquire into the distribution of the king's moneys given to cathedral cities and towns for the relief of the poor and maintenance of highways. In 1547 he wrote a severe letter to the fellows of King's, where private masses had been laid aside. Soon after that he resigned the provostship. In the following reign of Edward VI, in 1548, Day was appointed on the celebrated body called the Windsor Commission, which drew up the