The Percy Folio is a folio book of English ballads used by Thomas Percy to compile his Reliques of Ancient Poetry . Although the manuscript itself was compiled in the 17th century, some of its material goes back well into the 12th century. It was the most important of the source documents used by Francis James Child for his 1883 collection The English and Scottish Popular Ballads .
19-714: The Greene Knight is a late medieval rhyming romance, found in the Percy Folio Manuscript. The storyline effectively parallels the more famous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in describing the dealings of Gawain , King Arthur 's nephew, with the Greene Knight . The text was edited by Thomas Hahn for the Camelot Project. Key differences adduced by Hahn from the longer poem include rapid pacing, more explicit character motivations, and
38-424: A rhyme scheme more suitable for popular recitation. Hahn concludes "In many ways, in fact, The Greene Knight , as the later poem, seems almost a summary or guide in its determined spelling out of motives and events, its domestication of the challenging and mysterious, and its explanation of marvels and ambiguities." Hahn writes, "The language of The Greene Knight suggests that it was originally composed about 1500 in
57-485: Is in the British Library , known as Additional MS. 27879. In its present form the manuscript consists of some 520 paper pages, containing 195 individual items. The works were transcribed in the middle decades of the 17th century. The handwriting in the manuscript appears to be the same throughout and bears some similarity with that of Thomas Blount but it cannot be determined for certain if he originally collected
76-631: The Wandering Jew . The claim that the book contained samples of ancient poetry was only partially correct. The last part of each volume was given over to more contemporary works—often less than a hundred years old—included to stress the continuing tradition of the balladeer. The collection draws on the Folio and on other manuscript and printed sources, but in at least three cases anonymous informants, "ladies" in each case, contributed oral poetry known to them. He made substantial amendments to
95-569: The Folio text in collaboration with his friend the poet William Shenstone . The work was dedicated to Elizabeth Seymour, Duchess of Northumberland, who was married to Hugh Percy, 1st Duke of Northumberland . Elizabeth was part of the Percy family and a descendant of Henry Percy , a protagonist of some of the early ballads. Bishop Thomas Percy also claimed to be connected to the family and although this may have been fanciful on his part, it did seem to help him secure his preferment. The dedication to
114-839: The Mantle and The Turke and Gowin . The last three narratives are entirely unknown outside the Percy Folio. The manuscript also preserves eight Robin Hood ballads: " Robin Hood's Death ", " Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne ", " Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar ", " Robin Hood and the Butcher ", " The Jolly Pinder of Wakefield ", " Little John a Begging ", " Robin Hood Rescuing Three Squires ", and " Robin Hood and Queen Katherine ". Percy published several pieces from
133-543: The Scottish Border . The more rigorous scholarship of folklorists would eventually supersede Percy's work, most notably in Francis James Child 's Child Ballads , but Percy gave impetus to the whole subject. The book is also credited, in part, with changing the prevailing literary movement of the 18th century, Neo-Classicism , into Romanticism . The classicist Augustans took as their model
152-538: The South Midlands. It is marked for two fitts (perhaps indicating performance sessions), and falls into eighty-six tail-rhyme stanzas, running aabccb." This article related to a poem is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Percy Folio Those who owned the manuscript before Percy did not treat it well; its owners had probably regarded its Middle English and border dialect as incomprehensible and worthless. When Percy first came across
171-574: The duchess meant that Thomas Percy arranged the work to give prominence to the border ballads which were composed in and about the Scottish and English borders, specifically Northumberland , home county of the Percies. Percy also omitted some of the racier ballads from the Folio for fear of offending his noble patron: these were first published by F. J. Furnivall in 1868. Ballad collections had appeared before but Percy's Reliques seemed to capture
190-601: The epic hexameters of Virgil 's Aeneid and the blank verse of John Milton 's three epics. The Reliques highlighted the traditions and folklore of England seen as simpler and less artificial. It would inspire folklore collectors and movements in other parts of Europe and beyond, such as the Brothers Grimm in French-occupied Westphalia and Hesse , and such movements would act as the foundation of romantic nationalism . The Percy Society
209-587: The folio in the house of his friend Humphrey Pitt of Shifnal , a small market town of Shropshire . It was on the floor, and Pitt's maid had been using the leaves to light fires. Once rescued, Percy would use just forty-five of the ballads in the folio for his book, despite claiming the bulk of the collection came from this folio. Other sources were the Pepys Library of broadside ballads collected by Samuel Pepys and Collection of Old Ballads published in 1723, possibly by Ambrose Philips . Bishop Percy
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#1732772430614228-461: The following year. Reliques of Ancient English Poetry The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (sometimes known as Reliques of Ancient Poetry or simply Percy's Reliques ) is a collection of ballads and popular songs collected by Bishop Thomas Percy and published in 1765 . The basis of the work was the manuscript which became known as the Percy Folio . Percy found
247-449: The manuscript, in the house of its former owner Sir Humphrey Pitt of Shifnal, pages were being used by his housemaids to start fires. Percy had the manuscript bound, and the bookbinder inflicted additional damage in trimming the edges of the sheets, losing first or last lines on many pages. Percy did not treat the manuscript particularly well himself; he wrote notes and comments in it and tore out some pages after binding. The original folio
266-421: The manuscript, many of which were "repaired" or frankly rewritten, especially in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry , but did not allow fellow historians access to the original manuscript during his lifetime. Percy's book was the constant companion of Gottfried August Bürger , a childhood hero of Novalis , one of the chief influences of George MacDonald , whom C.S. Lewis considered his master. And thus
285-722: The manuscript, through Percy's book had a direct line of influence on Lewis's works. Despite its losses, the Percy Folio ranks alongside the Exeter Book , the Pearl Manuscript , and the Cotton library 's monstrarum librarum of the Beowulf manuscript as one of the most important documents in English poetry. A full edition of the folio's contents was not published until 1867, with a supplement of "loose and humorous" songs
304-524: The public imagination like no other. Not only would it inspire poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth to compose their own literary ballads in imitation, it also made the collecting and study of oral poetry a popular pastime. Sir Walter Scott was another writer inspired by reading the Reliques in his youth, and he published some of the ballads he collected in Minstrelsy of
323-802: The work. The loose leaves that comprise the manuscript are now individually mounted and covered with gauze. In addition to the ballads culled and compiled by Percy and Child, the folio contains an alliterative poem in Middle English entitled Death and Liffe and Scottish Feilde , which is a poem on the Battle of Flodden . The manuscript contains ballads, for the most part, but also metrical romances such as Sir Degaré and The Squire of Low Degree . There are several Arthurian texts, including King Arthur and King Cornwall , Sir Lancelott of Dulake , The Marriage of Sir Gawain , Merline , The Carle of Carlisle , The Greene Knight , The Boy and
342-663: Was criticised for these actions even at the time, most notably by Joseph Ritson , a fellow antiquary . The folio he worked from seems to have been written by a single copyist and errors such as pan and wale for wan and pale needed correcting. The Reliques contained one hundred and eighty ballads in three volumes with three sections in each. It contains such important ballads as " The Ballad of Chevy Chase ", " The Battle of Otterburn ", " Lillibullero ", " The Dragon of Wantley ", " The Nut-Brown Maid " and " Sir Patrick Spens " along with ballads mentioned by or possibly inspiring Shakespeare , several ballads about Robin Hood and one of
361-426: Was encouraged to publish the work by his friends Samuel Johnson and the poet William Shenstone , who also found and contributed ballads. Percy did not treat the folio nor the texts in it with the scrupulous care expected of a modern editor of manuscripts. He wrote his own notes directly on the folio pages, emended the rhymes and even pulled pages out of the document to give to the printer without making copies. He
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