Introduction

Summary

In 1867, John Hales (1836–1914) and Frederick J. Furnivall (1825–1910), two distinguished Victorian men of letters and enthusiasts for earlier literature (Gregory 2006), produced a new edition of a very famous poetic miscellany: the seventeenth-century Percy Folio manuscript. This volume, now London, British Library, MS Additional 27879, is a collection of ballads and romances, many originating (it seems) in the late Middle Ages, albeit heavily revised by a seventeenth-century learned (and, probably, royalist) antiquarian (Donatelli 1993). The new edition superseded that of the manuscript’s eponymous first editor, Bishop Thomas Percy (1729–1811), who a century earlier had included much of its contents in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765).