PRICE, DAVID (1762 - 1835), Orientalist

Born in 1762 at Merthyr Cynog near Brecon, shortly before the preferment of his father (of the same name) to be vicar of Llanbadarnfawr, Aberystwyth. After his father's death in 1775, David Price received a free education at the hands of David Griffith (1726 - 1816). master of Christ College School, Brecon, and his father's erstwhile rector. After one term (1779-80) at Jesus College, Cambridge, he enlisted, as a consequence of poverty and dissipation, in the East India Co's army, and served in India from 1781-1805, when he returned home reasonably well off by his share of the spoils of Seringapatam. In April 1807 he married the daughter of a kinswoman living at Brecon, where, on his final retirement in October he bought Watton House and settled down to literary pursuits. Of his books, printed at the local press of Priscilla Hughes, the best known is the Mahommedan History (1811-21) - the work of an exact and conscientious scholar in spite of its involved style. A memorial was erected to him in the Priory church after his death on 16 December 1835, on which it is said that he served as a magistrate and deputy-lieutenant. He is probably the David Price who was borough bailiff in 1820 and 1827. He received the gold medal of the Oriental Translation Committee in 1830; he contributed to the journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, and bequeathed to the latter his valuable collection of about seventy Oriental manuscripts.

Author

• Dafydd Rhys ap Thomas

Sources

• David Price, Memoirs of the Early Life and Service of a Field Officer on the Retired List of the Indian Army (London 1839) (anon. and posthumous)
• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
• Poole, The Illustrated History and Biography of Brecknockshire (1886), 312-3

Further Reading

• Wikipedia Article: David Price

Additional Links

• VIAF: 90781929
• Wikidata: Q5238710

Published date: 1959

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