The cause of the printing of Percy’s MS., of the publication of this book, was the insistence, time after time, by Professor Child, that it was the duty of Englishmen to print this foundation document of English balladry, the basis of that structure which Percy raised, so fair to the eyes of all English-speaking men throughout the world.

——, F. J. Furnivall, Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript (1868).[1]

Introduction

In May 1868, the contents of one of the most important manuscript collections of English poetry finally entered print.[2] The volume, known today as the “Percy Folio” (British Library Add MS 27879), had long occupied an almost legendary place in English literary history. Preserved by Thomas Percy in the eighteenth century, mined for material to print in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) and very few scholars beyond Percy’s inner circle were allowed to see it. Coveted by later scholars, the text of the manuscript now appeared in a monumental four-volume edition produced by Frederick J. Furnivall (1825–1910), John W. Hales (1836–1914), and Francis J. Child (1825–1896). The editors had good reason to be pleased with themselves.

The book was titled Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript. The first three volumes were subtitled Ballads and Romances and they were heavy tomes of approximately 500 pages each. A fourth and final volume of Loose and Humorous Songs was a much smaller paperback, of 127 pages, and was edited solely by Furnivall.

The printed edition was a monumental work and hundreds of subscribers had already pledged their support to buy the full set of Furnivall, Hales, and Child’s new work. Like all works of such stature, it would be an exceedingly expensive addition to any collector’s libraries. A subscriber could expect to pay £15 15s for the set.[3] That figure would equate to approximately £1,000 in today’s values.[4] The manuscript had finally escaped the private study, but it entered the world of print as a luxury of scholarship rather than a book for common readers.

The Manuscript

What scholars now call the ‘Percy Folio’ is bears the title, written in an ‘ancient hand’, of ‘Curious old ballads w^ch. Occasionally I have met with’.[5] It was a total of 195 ‘old ballads’ that the compiler’s ‘ancient hand’ met with, all of which date from the late medieval and early modern periods. Many of the poems in the collection were unknown variants of songs that had once been popular and that someone had decided to record in the 1630s. Yet the Percy Folio also contained the texts of several important poems that were not found anywhere else. Among this collection was the only surviving copy of ‘Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne’, one of the most important Robin Hood ballads and a text without which the literary history of England’s famous outlaw would look markedly different.[6] Alongside the Robin Hood text, the Percy Folio also contained the only extant versions of four early modern Arthurian texts: ‘The Carle of Carlisle’, ‘The Green Knight’, ‘The Boy and the Mantle’, and ‘The Turk and Gowin’.[7] Thus, the Percy Folio was not simply a repository of old songs, but one of the frail vessels by which whole regions of medieval and early modern literary culture survived into the modern age.

The manuscript (or perhaps manuscripts) was composed of 520 disbound paper pages, measuring 15 ½ inches long (39.37cm) by 5 ½ inches wide (13.97cm). Many of the sheets had been folded up, leading to creases in certain places. Nor had the manuscript been treated with much care before it came into Percy’s possession: Humphrey Pitt, its previous owner, left it

‘lying dirty on the floor in y^e Parlour’.[8]

As a result, the papers became ‘scrubby’ and ‘shabby’, according to by Furnivall.[9]

A rather Romantic tale is attached to Percy’s recovery of the manuscript from the home of Humphrey Pitt. Percy was born in Bridgnorth, Shropshire, but, having graduated with an MA from Christ Church, Oxford, was awarded the vicarage of Easton Maudit in Northamptonshire.[10] Clerical duties took up much of the young prelate’s time, but he made periodic visits back home to his native county. On one visit in 1753, he called in at the home of a friend, Humphrey Pitt. It was at Pitt’s house that Percy found the manuscript dirty and lying on the floor. To Percy’s further horror, Pitt’s maid had been using leaves from the manuscript to light the fire.

Percy, presumably having stayed the maid’s hand from casting any more pages onto the fire, asked his friend Pitt if he could take the manuscript. Upon making further enquiries into the manuscript’s provenance, Pitt revealed that he had purchased it, along with several books, from the library of the Lancashire lexicographer Thomas Blount (1618–1679). One of Blount’s descendants was an apothecary in Shiffnal, Shropshire, and had put several volumes of Blount’s library up for auction, while others were sold privately. The purchase was intended as a gift to Pitt’s nephew, Robert Binnel, who later became a clergyman. Binnel took most of the early modern printed books that his uncle had bought for him but left the manuscript at Pitt’s house.[11] It was Pitt’s belief that Blount was also the transcriber of the songs which would explain the presence of several royalist songs from the English Civil War era such as ‘When the King Enjoys His Own Again’. That Blount was compiler of the manuscript cannot, however, be proved with much certainty.[12]

Percy’s Folio

Before his name became attached to the collection of medieval and early modern songs that he had rescued from the fire, Percy had made a name for himself as a translator and editor of Chinese literature. His first publication was Hau Kiou Choaan; or, The Pleasing History (1759), an English and Portuguese translation of a Chinese novel. The circumstances surrounding the volume’s appearance were strikingly similar to those that accompanied the recovery of the folio. The novel, in manuscript form, was found in the collection of a ‘gentleman’ named James Wilkinson, who worked for the East India Company; when Percy published it, it became the first English-language translation of a Chinese literary text.[13] Percy, it seems, had a peculiar talent for rescuing obscuring works.

With the recovery of the manuscript from Pitt’s house, Percy evidently knew he was on to something special. Yet, by his own admission, Percy did not possess the expertise in ancient English literature or in the conservation of century-old manuscript texts. Percy’s first mistake was to send the disbound papers to a bookbinder so that all of the poems and songs could be bound in a single volume. This was a good idea in principle but Percy could have been more discerning in his selection of binders. The ‘ignorant’ binder trimmed the pages of manuscript to create a neatly bound volume but in the process had pared off several lines of text from some of the ballads.[14]

When I first got possession of this MS. I was very young, and being in no degree an antiquary, I had not then learnt to reverence it; which must be my excuse for the scribble which I then spread over some parts of its margin, and in one or two instances for even taking out the leaves to save the trouble of transcribing.[15]

After Percy’s intervention, then, the ancient manuscript now bears not only the seventeenth-century compiler’s hand but Percy’s marginal notes as well. Yet the question of what to do with the manuscript itself remained: would it be left to languish in Percy’s personal library or would be publish an edition?

The Appearance of Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765)

Percy did not do much with the manuscript initially. The most that he did in the decade that followed was read out some of the old poems to entertain guests when they came to visit and make copies of some of the poems from the folio available to fellow antiquarian researchers.[16] It was not until Percy had had conversations with the poet, William Shenstone, around the year 1760, that he decided to publish a small selection of poems from the folio.[17]

Shenstone wanted to be co-editor of the as yet unnamed book that would follow a transcription and publication of selected poems from the manuscript. Shenstone’s death in 1763, however, cut short any further participation in the project. Several other leading lights of the Georgian literary scene, such as David Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith, and Thomas Gray, lent their support to the prelate in the preparation of this publication.[18]

The publisher J. Dodsley offered Percy 100 guineas for the rights to publish the first edition of what would be titled the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry which, upon its first publication in 1765, retailed at ten shillings and sixpence.^[19] Published in three octavo volumes, the Reliques contained only a fraction of those which appeared in the manuscript. Of the 180 poems that appeared in the published Reliques, only 45 of them were taken from the folio manuscript. The remaining poems and songs that were reprinted therein had been available for some time in the archives of Magdalen College, Cambridge, and the Bodleian Library, Oxford, where any antiquary could consult them. Some of the texts that Percy included had also been printed before in Ambrose Phillips’s Collection of Old Ballads (1723) and Thomas D’Urfey’s Wit and Mirth; or, Pills to Purge Melancholy (published in 5 volumes between 1698 and 1720).

Finally, some of Percy’s ‘reliques’ were thoroughly modern, being reproductions of broadside ballads—single sheets of paper containing song lyrics—that were available from itinerant sellers up and down the country. The publication essentially transformed easily available, though somewhat ephemeral, ditties into historical artefacts.[20] It was somewhat disingenuous, then, for Percy to market the entire volume as the reproduction of ancient ‘reliques’ (an archaic spelling of ‘relics’) of long-forgotten English poetry. That being said, it was Shenstone, not Percy, who suggested that ‘modern’ songs be included in the Reliques alongside those from the folio.[21]

Despite the volumes’ somewhat ambiguous concept of ‘ancientness’ in relation to the ballads contained therein, Percy’s work became immediately popular with the reading public. The Reliques arrived at a precise moment in English cultural history when the nation’s past achievements and military exploits were being celebrated in the arts.^[22] In 1731, Henry Fielding’s play The Tragedy of Tragedies; or, The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great premiered at the Theatre Royal in the Haymarket, and was set in the time of King Arthur.^[23] Thomas Arne’s opera Alfred was performed at Cliveden in Buckinghamshire in 1740 for the commemoration of the accession of George I. Arne’s opera is most famous, of course, for its finale, ‘Rule, Britannia!’ Audiences would later applaud the procession of characters from Shakespeare’s history plays during David Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769. Percy’s work, alongside the vivid portrayal of the medieval past in the theatre, attempted to resurrect the sounds of ‘olde, merrie England’, using archaic spellings to evoke ‘the remote rumble of national history’.^[24] Part of the appeal of the Reliques was therefore the supposed primitivism and historical authenticity of the medieval and early modern tales contained in the anthology. Polite and refined Georgian readers could also be proud of their forebears and admire how far their culture had progressed since the ‘rude’ and ‘barbarous’ Middle Ages.[25]

Percy’s Emendations

In his introduction to Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript, Furnivall remarked that ‘men with a turn for verse writing seem unable to resist the temptation of falsifying and forging old ballads’.[26] Percy, we recall, only published 45 texts from the folio manuscript. To these 45 texts, he made several emendations, and in some cases added new material, to ensure that they were acceptable to the eighteenth-century reading public.

Some changes were minor, but the lack of any transparent justification for them made them appear rather odd. The folio version of ‘Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne’, for example, closes with Little John shooting and killing the sheriff:

but he cold neither soe fast goe,

nor away soe fast runn,

but litle Iohn with an arrow broade

did cleaue his heart in twin.[27]

Yet the version that was published in the Reliques reads:

But he cold neither runne foe faft,

Nor away foe faft cold ryde,

But Little John with an arrowe foe broad,

He fhott him into the ‘backe’-fyde.[28]

The second version from the Reliques been emended and the meaning has completely changed. The sheriff of Nottingham survives, presumably to limp to the toilet for the rest of his life.

Another example of Percy’s alterations and additions to the poems can be found in the poem of ‘The Marriage of Sir Gawain’:

Kinge Arthur liues in merry Carleile,

& seemly is to see,

& there he hath with him Qqueene Guenev[er]

[tha]t bride soe bright of blee.

And there he hath with Queene Genever,

[tha]t bride soe bright in bower,

& all his barons about him stoode

[tha]t were both stiffe and stowre.

The K[ing] kept a royall Christmasse

Of mirth & great honor,

& when …………[29]

After ‘when’ about 9 stanzas are missing from the manuscript but this would not prevent Percy from presenting a newly augmented version for the finished Reliques. The third volume of the 1765 edition reads thus:

KING Arthur lives in merry Carleile,

And feemely is to fee;

And there with him queene Guenever,

That bride foe bright ef blee.

And there with him queene Guenever,

That bride so bright in bowre:

And all his barons about him stoode,

That were both stiffe and stowre.

The king a royall Christmasse kept,

With mirth and princely cheare;

To him repaired many a knight,

That came both farre and neare.

And when they were to dinner sette,

And cups went freely round;

Before them came a faire damselle,

And knelt upon the ground.

A boone, a boone, O kinge Arthure,

I beg a boone of thee,

Avenge me of a carlish knighte,

Who hath shent my love and mee.

In Tearne-Wadling his castle stands,

All on a hill soe hye,

And proudlye rise the battlements,

And gaye the streamers flye.

Noe gentle knighte, nor ladye faire,

May pass that castle-walle:

But from that foule discourteous knighte,

Mishappe will them befalle.

Hee’s twyce the size of common men,

Wi’ thewes, and sinewes stronge,

And on his backe he bears a clubbe,

That is both thicke and longe.[30]

The italicised lines are those supplied by Percy’s own imagination, though they were not marked as such in the first edition of the Reliques. They are fine verses, certainly, and they no doubt satisfied readers who preferred complete poems to mutilated fragments. The difficulty, however, is obvious: Percy’s additions could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be called a ‘relique’ of ancient English poetry.

The point need not be laboured with further examples but at the same time we must be fair to Percy. It was a common practice to give a modern gloss to existing texts. Nahum Tate had no qualms about altering the plots of Shakespeare’s plays. Tate’s The History of King Lear (1681) incorporated musical numbers, new characters, and new subplots into Shakespeare’s masterpiece. The poet and essayist Joseph Addison, in his ‘translation’ of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, incorporated literary flourishes that had no basis in the original Latin.[31]

Yet writers such as Addison and Tate, who tinkered with historical texts, were more justified in doing so because the originals were well known and anyone could consult them if they wished. This was not the case with the Percy Folio, which few beyond Percy’s inner circle of scholars could examine because he would not allow public scrutiny of it. It is no surprise that one rather outspoken scholar soon began to question whether the manuscript existed at all. The man who made the accusation was Joseph Ritson (1752–1803), although fellow literary men in Ritson’s circle assured him that Percy’s manuscript did indeed exist. Ritson therefore began to question the antiquity of the poems, stating that, until the manuscript was available for public examination, the medieval and early modern origins of many of the texts could not be verified.

It is difficult to underestimate the impact that Percy’s Reliques had on the eighteenth-century scholarly community. It informed much subsequent research into the history of English literature, having become a key resource for Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry (1774–1781) and Sir John Hawkins’s General History of the Science and Practice of Music (1774). With ever more people requesting the see the manuscript so they could analyse the originals of the ancient poems (which would then highlight Percy’s less-than-transparent editorialising) the now Bishop Percy began to greatly tire of English literary studies and felt inclined to abandon any further work on the subject.[32] Nevertheless, a fourth edition of the Reliques came out in 1794. Percy kept his original texts as published in 1765 but added an appendix in which he offered a diplomatic transcription of the texts that, like ‘The Marriage of Sir Gawain’, he had ‘offered to the reader with large conjectural supplements and corrections’.[33]

Percy’s belated appendix was therefore both a concession and a confession: the authority of the Reliques had always depended upon a manuscript that readers were still not permitted to see. He had to give his critics something and, at least, with the publication of the fourth edition’s appendix, readers might get a glimpse of some of the contents of this precious manuscript.

The Eventual Publication of the Manuscript

Percy’s main foe, Ritson, died in 1803, never having seen the manuscript. Percy, whose bishopric was in Dromore, Ireland, went blind in his latter years and passed away in 1811. Percy’s family continued to refuse scholars access to the manuscript because one of them intended to publish an edition of its contents, but this project never came to fruition.[34]

It was only in the 1860s, when Furnivall, Hales, and Child began pressing for access and sweetened their request with a payment of £150 to Percy’s descendants, that a full printed edition became possible. The edition was to be comprise a diplomatic edition of the actual texts, ‘without Percy’s tawdry touches’,[35] and critical introductions to each of the poems. The payment allowed the scholars, assisted by a team of copyists and researchers, to retain the manuscript for six months while transcripts were made. Percy’s family later extended the period of access to thirteen months, giving the editors time not only to copy the manuscript but also to check the printer’s proofs against the original.

Perhaps the whole process of allowing researchers access to the manuscript changed the families’ outlook. They later agreed to sell the manuscript to the British Museum for an undisclosed amount. The manuscript was then transferred to the British Library where it is known as British Library Add. MS. 27879 and accessible to researchers.

The publication of Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript in 1868 therefore marked the end of one phase in the manuscript’s history and the beginning of another. For more than a century, the Folio had existed in a strange half-light: famous enough to shape the study of English poetry, yet hidden enough to provoke suspicion, conjecture, and resentment. Percy had saved it from neglect, fire, and probable destruction, but he had also damaged, altered, embellished, and withheld it. His Reliques made the manuscript culturally powerful while also making the eventual publication of the manuscript itself unavoidable.

Furnivall, Hales, and Child’s edition did not make the Percy Folio popular in the way that the Reliques had been popular. At fifteen guineas, it was never intended for the casual reader. Its importance lay elsewhere. It returned the manuscript, as far as print could do so, to the domain of evidence. Readers no longer had to rely solely on Percy’s taste, memory, conjecture, or editorial conscience. They could see, compare, and judge the texts for themselves.

The history of the Percy Folio is thus a history of survival, mediation, and delayed disclosure. A bundle of shabby, folded, fire-threatened papers became the hidden source of one of the most influential books of eighteenth-century literary culture; then, after decades of pressure, suspicion, and scholarly labour, it became a printed monument in its own right. The manuscript that Humphrey Pitt had left dirty on a parlour floor had finally become what Furnivall called it: a foundation document of English balladry.

References

[1] Frederick J. Furnivall, ‘Forewords’, in Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript: Ballads and Romances, ed. by John W. Hales et al., 3 vols (London: N. Trubner, 1867), I, p. ix–xxvi (p. xii).

[2] ‘Literature, Science, and Art’, Birmingham Journal, 9 May 1868, p. 10. The title page of the first edition of volume one carries the date of 1867, but it is evident by the numerous newspaper advertisements and reviews that 1868 is the date that it became available for sale. The second and third volumes bear the date of 1868.

[3] ‘Opinion of the Weekly News’, Pall Mall Gazette, 15 August 1868, p. 3.

[4] National Archives, ‘Currency Converter’, <https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter> [accessed 10 May 2026].

[5] Furnivall, ‘Forewords’, p. xvi.

[6] For a critical edition see ‘Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne’, in Robin Hood: A Collection of all the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads, 2 vols (London: Egerton and Johnson, 1795), I, pp. 114–125.

[7] For a critical edition of these see the following: John Withrington, ed. The Arthurian Texts of the Percy Folio (Liverpool University Press, 2023). See also Douglas Gray, ‘A Note on the Percy Folio Grene Knight’, in Arthurian Studies in Honour of P.J.C. Field, ed. by Bonnie Wheeler (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2013), pp. 165–172.

[8] Furnivall, ‘Forewords’, p. xii.

[9] Furnivall, ‘Forewords’, p. xii.

[10] J. Pickford, ‘The Life of Bishop Percy’, in Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript: Ballads and Romances, ed. by John W. Hales et al., 3 vols (London: N. Trubner, 1867), I, pp. xvii—lxxii (p. xxi).

[11] Thomas Percy, ‘Northumberland House, Nov. 7^th, 1769’, in Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript: Ballads and Romances, ed. by John W. Hales et al., 3 vols (London: N. Trubner, 1867), I, p. lxxiv.

[12] Jeremy J. Smith, Transforming Early English: The Reinvention of Early English and Older Scots (Cambridge University Press, 2020), p. 1.

[13] T. C. Fan, ‘Percy’s Hau Kiou Choaan’, Review of English Studies, 22: 86 (1946), pp. 117–125 (p. 125).

[14] Percy, ‘Northumberland House, Nov. 7^th, 1769’, p. lxxiv.

[15] Thomas Percy, ‘Notes inside the cover of the MS. by Percy’, in Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript: Ballads and Romances, ed. by John W. Hales et al., 3 vols (London: N. Trubner, 1867), I, p. lxxiv.

[16] Nick Groom, The Making of Percy’s Reliques (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 6.

[17] Pickford, ‘Life of Bishop Percy’, p. xxxv; Groom, The Making of Percy’s Reliques, p. 7.

[18] Pickford, ‘Life of Bishop Percy’, p. xxxv.

[19] ‘Books Published in February’, Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure,February 1765, p. 111.

[20] Nick Groom, ‘The Purest English: Ballads and the English Literary Dialect’, The Eighteenth Century, 47: 2/3 (2006), 179-202 (p. 183).

[21] Thomas Percy, ‘Preface’, in Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, ed. by Thomas Percy, 3 vols (London: J. Dodsley, 1765), I, p. xii.

[22] See Chris Brooks, The Gothic Revival (London: Phaidon, 1999).

[23] See notes and introduction to the play in the following work: Tom Thumb: And The Tragedy of Tragedies, ed. by L. J. Morrissey (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1970).

[24] Groom, ‘The Purest English’, p. 198.

[25] Stephen Basdeo, ‘The Changing Faces of Robin Hood: Rethinking Gentrification in the Post-Medieval Tradition’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Leeds Trinity University, 2017), p. 98.

[26] Furnivall, ‘Forewords’, p. xxi.

[27] ‘Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne’, in Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript: Ballads and Romances, ed. by John W. Hales et al., 3 vols (London: N. Trubner, 1867), II, pp. 227–31 (p. 231).

[28] ‘Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne’, in Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, ed. by Thomas Percy, 3 vols (London: J. Dodsley, 1765), I, pp. 74–86 (p. 86).

[29] ‘The Marriage of Sr Gawaine’, in Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript: Ballads and Romances, ed. by John W. Hales et al., 3 vols (London: N. Trubner, 1867), II, pp. 103–118 (pp. 103–104).

[30] ‘The Marriage of Sir Gawaine’, in Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, ed. by Thomas Percy, 3 vols (London: J. Dodsley, 1765), III, pp. 11–24 (pp. 11–12).

[31] David Hopkins, ‘Addison as Translator’, in Joseph Addison: Tercentenary Essays, ed. by Paul Davis (Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 18–39 (p. 29).

[32] Groom, The Making of Percy’s Reliques, p. 7.

[33] ‘The Ancient Fragment of the Marriage of Sir Gawaine’, in Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, ed. by Thomas Percy, 4^th edn, 3 vols (London: John Nichols, 1794), III, p. 350.

[34] Furnivall, ‘Forewords’, p. xvi.

[35] Furnivall, ‘Forewords’, p. xi.