Reliques Of Ancient English Poetry, Consisting Of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, And Other Pieces Of Our Earliest Poets, Together With Some Few Of Later Date. Third Edition, With Amended Essay
Thomas Percy (13 April 1729 – 30 September 1811) was Bishop of Dromore, County Down, Ireland. Before being made bishop, he was chaplain to George III. Percy's greatest contribution is considered to be his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), the first of the great ballad collections, which was the one work most responsible for the ballad revival in English poetry that was a significant part of the Romantic movement. The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry set the stage not only for Robert Burns, but also for Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads. The book is based on an old manuscript collection of poetry, which Percy claimed to have rescued in Humphrey Pitt's house at Shifnal, Shropshire, "from the hands of the housemaid who was about to light the fire with it." The manuscript was edited in its complete form by JW Hales and FJ Furnivall in 1867-1868. This manuscript provides the core of the work but many other ballads were found and included, some by Percy's friends Johnson, William Shenstone, Thomas Warton, and some from a similar collection made by Samuel Pepys.
Percy "improved" 35 of the 46 ballads he took from the Folio. In the case of The Beggar's daughter of Bednal Green (Bethnal Green), he added the historical character of Simon de Montfort, Earl of Evesham. In this version the ballad became so popular that it was used in two plays, an anonymous novel, operas by Thomas Arne and Geoffrey Bush, and Carl Loewe's ballad "Der Bettlers Tochter von Bednall Green". A fuller account of the history of the ballad can be found in "The Green" by A. J. Robinson and D. H. B. Chesshyre.
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