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This chapter examines the early history and the preparations made by Thomas Percy for his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. It suggests Percy's putative anthology was influenced by two original materials: Samuel Pepys' collection of 17th century broadsides and Percy's own collection of 18th century broadsides. Percy started transcribing Pepys' broadside ballads in August 1761 and the following month he began to plan the publication of the Reliques. His editorial method was based on the relationship between oral and literary sources. This chapter also discusses the problems encountered by Percy in the printing of the Reliques.

Will Percy did not mention the unusual rate of mortality that this generation and the next had to confront. There were too many occasions to mourn, beginning with Thomas's own childhood. This chapter describes the life of Thomas George Percy, emphasizing the bonds he formed and the trials he faced. If Thomas George Percy had any inclination toward melancholy, he had ample reason. His father had killed himself when the boy, born in 1786, was eight years old. He had witnessed the deaths of his two younger brothers, William and Luke, in the 1790s from childhood diseases. Thomas Percy's eldest sister Sarah had to be hospitalized with melancholia in her middle years. Another sister, Susan, died young, sometime after 1809. But more than that, Thomas also formed close friendships with John Walker and Samuel Brown—a fraternal ring not to be broken as long as they lived.

This chapter examines the historical background of the printing of Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. The printing of the Reliques took James Dodsley two and a half years to finish. This chapter explores the intersection of the texts of Percy's different literary projects in the light of renewed advice from William Shenstone regarding the printing of the Reliques, and Percy's spiralling circle of correspondents. It also highlights the extant proofs and revisions made by Percy prior to the actual printing of the Reliques.

This chapter examines the conflict between Thomas Percy and Celtic bard James Macpherson on the subject of literary antiquarianism. The rival claims of Percy and Macpherson on the literary establishment indicate that the handling of the source was crucial to the antiquarian reception of literature and its incorporation into the canon. The two writers derived their methodologies from opposing theories of British history to validate their respective ancient poetry. This chapter suggests that Percy's critical debate with Macpherson influenced the evolution of the literature canon into a hierarchy of physical texts distinct from the popular oral traditions which were codified as folklore in the 1800s.

This chapter examines the origins of Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. It suggests that serious work on Percy's collection started after his September 1760 meeting with poet William Shenstone and publisher Robert Dodsley. This meeting inspired Percy and Shenstone to produce two books within five years. The first was Five Pieces of runic Poetry published in 1763 and the second, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, in 1765. Both books were published by Dodsley's publishing company.

This chapter examines the ballads contained in Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, which was published in 1765. Though Percy's collection includes sonnets, songs, and lyrics, its contents were mostly old ballads. His working title for the collection was A Collection of Old Ballads and one of his principal printed sources was a three-volume edition of the same title. The old ballads in Percy's collection cover the subjects of border wars, King Arthur, Robin Hood, and traditional pageantry. Percy's adviser in the compilation of the ballads was William Shenstone.

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. This three-volume collection of ballads, songs, sonnets, and romances is one of the finest examples of the antiquarian tendency in later 18th century English poetry. This book explores Percy's research work for his book and explains his working method to show how his methodological assumptions influenced the late-18th century literary antiquarianism.

Throughout her life, Sarah Anne Ellis Dorsey sought to combine the routines of a typical plantation lady with a sense of feminine intellectuality, which superior learning and wealth made possible. In comparison with Southern white women of similar tastes and high education, Sarah Dorsey, her married name, was much more experimental and extensive in her search for individuality. One reason was her metropolitan links—to Philadelphia and New York, and after the Civil War, to London. By her own choice, much of her life was confined to a rural existence. Yet she strived to open new avenues of intellectual experience without risk to her marriage or her social and economic position. Romantic by temperament, she thought that it would be easy to pursue an intellectual, productive career and give up nothing of her imposing style of living.

This chapter examines the influence of Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry on English Romanticism. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge made public praise of the Reliques and admitted that their collaboration Lyrical Ballads was indebted to Percy. Thomas Evans based his Old Ballads, Historical and Narrative on Percy's works and Walter Scott collected in explicit homage to the Reliques. This chapter suggests that the faults in the Reliques made it irresistible to many readers who shared an eagerness to annotate and improve Percy's edition.

Eighteenth-century Britain saw the emergence of an extensive print discourse about ballads. Whereas early eighteenth-century commentators such as Joseph Addison took for granted the multimedia nature of balladry (oral, manuscript, printed), later ballad scholars such as Thomas Percy and William Motherwell posited a distinct “oral tradition” of balladry that was antithetical to and threatened by commercial print. The later eighteenth century saw landmark arguments for oral tradition: Robert Wood advanced the first detailed case for Homeric orality, while James Macpherson claimed to have translated the works of a third-century "Homer of the Highlands," Ossian. This chapter argues that eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century ballad scholars, influenced by and influencing these related debates, contributed significantly to the emergence of our modern secular concept of “oral tradition.” Editors and theorists such as Percy and Motherwell printed groundbreaking collections of ballads, yet their hostility towards broadside ballads (and more generally, commercial print) contributed to a problematic “displacement” model of media shift still with us today, whereby one mode of communication is imagined as destroying (rather than preserving) another. Ballad scholars also contributed to a binary model of orality and literacy by forging a sharp conceptual (not actual) separation between “oral” and “printed” ballads.

The reception of Amadis changes in the eighteenth century, with a play (Granville’s The British Enchanters (1706) ) and an opera (Handel’s Amadigi di Gaula (1715) ) presenting the romance for theatrical consumption and emphasizing its overt spectacularism in a revivified Amadisian aesthetic. In a parallel development, Amadis was mined by Shakespearean editors, Hispanists, and literary historians such as Isaac Reed, John Bowle, and Thomas Warton as indicative of early modern taste and a means of elucidating the works of Cervantes and Shakespeare. The chapter closes with an account of the ‘spectral’ relationship of Amadis to early Gothic fiction, arguing that the ‘ancient romances’ invoked in the preface to the second edition of Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1765) are none other than the libros de caballerías, and showing how Lewis’s The Monk (1796) takes the traditions of peninsular ‘fancy’ in an entirely new direction.

The stories of Robin Hood constitute the collective memory of popular counter-culture. The chapter entitled “Green Arrow” posits the legends of the green wood as the antecedent for this successful comic book series, but any look at Robin Hood leads also to the contested medievalisms of James Macpherson and Thomas Percy, the relationship of these men with Samuel Johnson, and the democratization of their vision through the work of the American scholar Francis James Child. Child, in turn, brings into our gaze the Boston Brahmin Charles Eliot Norton and, through him, the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow before we return once again to Howard Pyle whose singular vision, perhaps more than any other person, has shaped so much of how the 20th century sees the Middle Ages.

On November 4, 1605, Guy Fawkes was just another obscure English gentleman with Catholic sympathies and a decade of success as a courageous and skilled soldier. His obscurity abruptly changed in the night of November 5. On November 6, encouraged by “gentler tortures” ordered by the king, “John Johnson” confessed that he was Guy Fawkes. Thus the public quickly learned that Guy Fawkes had come very close to destroying the House of Lords with everyone in it, and the name Guy Fawkes became immediately one of the most famous in England, far more than that of Robert Catesby, because Guy had been the guy with the match. Within two months, all 13 of the Gunpowder Plot conspirators were arrested or killed, including four in a gunfight at Holbeche House in Staffordshire. On January 30 and 31, 1506, having been convicted of treason in a short trial, he and the seven others who remained alive were hanged, drawn, and quartered. That was the end for the earthly Guy.

Published in six folios during 1778 and 1779, Herder’s Volkslieder (Folk songs) has been one of the most influential works in modern intellectual history, even though it has never before appeared in English translation. The Volkslieder not only became the first collection of world music—songs came not only from many regions of Europe, but also from Africa, the Mediterranean, and South America—but also served as the source for European composers throughout the nineteenth century. Aesthetics, ethnography, and literary and cultural history converge to transform modern musical thought. Part one of the chapter contains translations from Herder’s own introductions to the songs, and part two contains twenty-four songs that represent the paradigm shift inspired by this monumental work on folk song.