FINGLAS, PATRICK (fl. 1535), Irish judge, was appointed baron of the exchequer in Ireland by Henry VIII in or before 1520, and afterwards, by patent dated at Westminster 8 May 1533, he was constituted chief justice of the king's bench in that kingdom in the place of Sir Bartholomew Dillon. He resigned the latter office in or before 1535.
He wrote 'A Breviat of the getting of Ireland, and of the Decaie of the same.' Printed in Harris's 'Hibernica,' edit. 1770, i. 79-103. It appears that the original manucript of this work is in the Public Record Office (State Papers, Henry VIII, Ireland, vol. xii. art.7). It is described in the calendar as 'An Historical Dissertation on the Conquest of Ireland, the decay of that land, and measures proposed to remedy the grievances thereof arising from the oppressions of the Irish nobility.
[Ware's Writers of Ireland (Harris), p.93; Liber Hiberniæ, ii. 30, 49; Cal. of State Papers relating to Ireland, 1509-73 (Hamilton), pp.3, 9, 14, 161.]
FINGLOW, JOHN (d. 1586), catholic divine, born at Barnby, near Howden, Yorkshire, was educated at the English College of Douay, during its temporary removal to Rheims, where he was ordained priest on 25 March 1661. Being sent on the mission he laboured zealously in the north of England until he was apprehended and committed to the Ousebridge Kidcote at York. He was tried and convicted of high treason, for being a priest made by Roman authority, and for having reconciled some of the queen's subjects to the catholic church. He was executed at York on 8 Aug. 1686.
[Douay Diaries , pp. 10, 28, 160, 176, 178, 261, 293; Challoner's Missionary Priests (1741), i. 183; Dodd's Church Hist. ii. 106; Morris's Troubles of our Catholic Forefathers, 3rd series; Stanton's Menology, p. 387.]
FININGHAM, ROBERT de (d. 1460), a brother in the Franciscan or Greyfriars' monastery at Norwich, where he was also educated, was born at Finingham in Suffolk, and flourished in the reign of Henry VI. He was a very learned man, skilled, as Pits expresses it, in all liberal arts, excelling especially in canon law, end was the author of numerous Latin works. The chief purpose of his writings was in defence of the Franciscans against the common accusation that their profession of poverty was hypocritical. The titles given of his works are as follows: 1.'Pro Ordine Minorum.' 2.'Pro dignitate Status eorum.' 3. 'Casus Conciliorum Angliæ.' 4. 'De Casibus Decretorum.' 5. 'De Casibus Decretalium.' 6. 'De Extravagantibus.' 7. 'De Excommunicationibus.' Tanner describes a manuscript of the last in Bishop Moore's library, now in the Cambridge University Library (E. e. v. 11).
[Pits, De Angliæ Scriptt. p. 652; Bale's Scriptt. Brit. cent. viii. § 23; Tanner's Bibl. Brit. p. 280; Blomefield's Hist. of Norfolk, iv. 113; Wadding's Scriptt. Min. Ord. (1650), p. 308.]
FINLAISON, JOHN (1783–1860), statistician and government actuary, son of Donald Finlayson (who spelt the name thus), was born at Thurso in Caithness-shire, 27 Aug. 1783, and at the age of seven was by the death of his father left an orphan. In 1802 he became factor to Sir Benjamin Dunbar (afterwards Lord Duffus), whose whole estates, together with those of Lord Caithness, were entrusted to his management when he was only nineteen years of age. He soon after went to Edinburgh to study for the bar, but having visited London in 1804 on business, he became attached to Elizabeth, daughter of the Rev. James Glen, and receiving the offer of an appointment under the board of naval revision, which enabled him to marry at once, he entered the government service in July 1805. He was shortly after promoted to be first clerk to the commission, and filled that office till the board closed its labours in August 1808. For some time previously he had also acted as secretary to a committee of the board, and in that capacity, although but twenty-three, he framed the eleventh and twelfth reports of the commission (Eleventh and Twelfth Reports of the Commissioners for Revising the Civil Affairs of His Majesty's Navy, 1809; Parl. Papers, 1809, vol. vi.), and was the sole author of the system for the reform of the victualling departments. The accounts had seldom been less than eighteen months in arrear, but by Finlaison's system they were produced, checked, and audited in three weeks, when the saving made in Deptford yard only in the first year, 1809, was 60,000l. In 1809 he was employed to devise some plan for arranging the records and despatches at the admiralty, and after nine months of incessant application produced a system of digesting and indexing the records by which any document could be immediately found. This plan met with such universal approval that it was adopted by France, Austria, and Russia, and its inventor received as a reward the order of the Fleur-de-lys from Louis XVIII in 1815 (Baron Charles Dupin, Voyages dans la Grande-Bretagne, 1821, pt. ii. vol. i. pp. 65–67). In the same year he was appointed keeper of the records and librarian of the admiralty, and became reporter and précis writer
