Palgrave, SIR FRANCIS, historian, was born in London in July 1788, the son of Meyer Cohen, a Jewish stockbroker. He was privately educated, and showed a quite remarkable precocity, having at eight translated into French a Latin version of the Battle of the Frogs and Mice, which his father printed in 1797. His father's fortunes failing in 1803, he was articulated as a solicitor's clerk, and here he remained until 1822, when he took chambers in the Temple and was employed under the Record Commission. On his marriage (1823) he assumed his mother-in-law's maiden name of Palgrave. He was called to the bar in 1827, and soon acquired considerable practice in pedigree cases before the House of Lords. As early as 1818 he had edited a collection of Anglo-Norman chansons; in 1831 he contributed a History of England to the 'Family Library'; and in 1832 he published his Rise and Progress of the English Commonwealth, also Observations on the Principles of New Municipal Corporations. The same year he was knighted. From 1833 to 1835 he served on the Municipal Corporation Commission, and in 1838, on the reconstruction of the Record Service, he was appointed deputy-keeper of Her Majesty's Records, an office he held till his death at Hampstead, 6th July 1861.
Besides the works already mentioned, Palgrave edited for the government the following: Calendars of the Treasury of the Exchequer (3 vols. 1836), Parliamentary Writs (1830-34), Rotuli Curiae Regis (1835), Ancient Calendars and Inventories of the Treasury of Her Majesty's Exchequer (1836), and Documents and Records illustrating the History of Scotland (1837). In his private capacity he produced the Merchant and the Friar [Marco Polo and Friar Bacon], and a learned and still valuable History of Normandy and of England (4 vols. 1851-64).