He was born at Wilton, Wiltshire near Salisbury the son of a servant of William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke.
He was primarily a clockmaker, and was, until the middle of the seventeenth century, accounted the first violinist in England in point of skill.
"[2] According to the same authority, Mell visited Oxford in March 1657–8, when "Peter Pett, Will Bull, Ken Digby, and others of Allsoules did give him a very handsome entertainment in the Taverne, called 'The Salutation,' in St. Marie's Parish.
Mell was conjointly with George Hudson the first "Master of the Music," or leader of Charles II's "four and twenty fiddlers," a band of twenty-four performers on the violin, tenor, and bass, instituted by the king in 1660 in imitation of Louis XIV's Les Vingt-quatre Violons du Roi.
In John Aubrey's Miscellanies is an account of a child of Davis Mell, who was cured of a crooked back by the touch of a dead hand.