SOURCE: “Old Barons in New Robes: Percy's Use of the Metrical Romances in the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry,” in Hermeneutics and Medieval Culture, edited by Patrick J. Gallacher and Helen Damico, State University of New York Press, 1989, pp. 225-35.

[In the following essay, Donatelli analyzes the Folio manuscript that was the primary source for Percy's Reliques, and notes the influence of metrical romances on Percy's editorial selections for this work.]

The publication of Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in 1765 changed the course of English literature. Wordsworth claimed that England's poetry “had been absolutely redeemed by it,” and he acknowledged the debt which he and other Romantic poets, most notably Coleridge, owed to the Reliques.¹ In later life, Scott recounted how his happy discovery of Percy's anthology “beneath a large platanas tree in the ruins of an … old fashioned arbour” caused him to miss his dinner hour, “notwithstanding the sharp appetite of thirteen.”² The Reliques went through four editions during Percy's lifetime, and the more than fifty editions of the work which have been published since Percy's death in 1811 attest to the continuing importance and stature of this collection of ballads, songs, and lyrics.

Even Dr. Johnson, an inveterate ballad-hater, had praised “the grace and splendour” which Percy had given to his studies of antiquity, while wryly observing that the “mere antiquarian is a rugged being.”³ Yet the very qualities that made Percy's work so attractive to a wide audience have been Percy's undoing among literary scholars. Because of his decision to alter his texts radically to cater to an eighteenth-century audience that had little taste for “unadulterated antiquity,” Percy has been scorned as an unscrupulous editor and dismissed as a popularizer. One of Percy's contemporaries, Joseph Ritson, set the tone for the attack when he impugned Percy's judgment and morals, and viciously accused him of secretly suppressing original texts and substituting his own fabrications.⁴

I would like to continue the rehabilitation of Percy's reputation undertaken by more recent scholars, including Walter Jackson Bate, Albert Friedman, and Cleanth Brooks,⁵ by looking at the famous Folio manuscript (BL Add. 27879) which clearly sparked Percy's interest in early English poetry, and provided him with many of the “select remains of our ancient English bards and minstrels” which were published in the Reliques. I would suggest that this manuscript molded Percy's highly influential view of the close relationship between the ballad and the metrical romance, and that this view may explain, though perhaps not justify, the editorial procedures for which Percy has been so roundly condemned.

In what must be one of the most charming bibliographic discoveries, Percy rescued this “unbound and sadly torn” volume from the house of his friend, Sir Humphrey Pitt, where it lay under a bureau, being used by the maids to light the fire.⁶ In this remarkable manuscript, Percy found late medieval versions of metrical romances, ballads, two alliterative poems (Death and Liffe and Scottish Feilde), and Tudor and Stuart lyrics and songs. The texts date from the late medieval period to the reign of Charles I. As we shall see, Percy believed this grand historical sweep to be even greater, and he put what he considered to be a survey of hitherto neglected medieval literary forms to good use, producing influential studies on the ballad and the role of the minstrel, the metrical romances, and alliterative poetry, all of which he included in the Reliques. Happily, this manuscript, which now bears his name, preserved unique copies of some of the best English ballads, yet the extraordinary corruption, in both sense and language, which characterizes these and other texts has led many a modern editor to wish that Percy had left the maids to their incendiary work.

The bulk of the Percy Folio manuscript is devoted to seventeen late versions of metrical romances. Although Percy did not include any romances in the Reliques, apparently because of their length, an essay on the metrical romances introduced the third volume of ballads on “romantic subjects,” and it reveals the extent of Percy's scholarly knowledge.⁷ Using the romances in his manuscript as a starting point, Percy published the first bibliography of Middle English romances in this essay. Percy had, in fact, transcribed twenty-six romances himself, and intended to publish a collection of them, although his plan was but one of many literary projects that the bishop never realized.⁸ Percy also took up the apology for the genre begun by Bishop Hurd and Thomas Warton by providing a synopsis of the Folio manuscript version of Libeaus Desconus (entitled Libius Disconius) to demonstrate that a romance, despite its “barbarous unpolished language,” could be “as regular in its conduct as any of the finest poems of antiquity.”

The sheer volume of metrical romances largely determined Percy's assumptions about the entire contents of the manuscript, for he interpreted the discrete parts of his model, the ballads, against a background formed by a gestalt of romances, even though the romances themselves were strangely absent from the Reliques. The juxtaposition of ballads and romances in the Folio MS convinced Percy that the ballads were also medieval “reliques,” closely related to the metrical romances. In an era with little firsthand knowledge of Middle English metrical romances, Percy believed that the ballads and romances in the manuscript describing heroes named in Chaucer's Sir Thopas (such as Guy of Warwick, Libeaus Desconus, and Sir Gawain) dated from before Chaucer's time. He concluded that Chaucer had borrowed the Wife of Bath's Tale from the ballad The Marriage of Sir Gawaine, and that Malory had only thrown together into a regular story “the Subject of a hundred Old Ballads.”⁹ Moreover, the highly corrupt and modernized state of the late romances in the Folio manuscript, which Derek Pearsall has described as half way to becoming ballads,¹⁰ blurred the distinction between ballads and romances in Percy's mind, since there seemed to be little difference between the style and content of these works. His terminology is often tentative and uncertain: he calls Libius Disconius and Sir Lambwell ballads, while referring to Sir Cauline as a “romantic tale.”¹¹

Despite the wretched state of the Folio MS texts, Percy believed that both the ballads and romances were originally composed and recited by minstrels, to whom Percy accorded an exalted function comparable to that of a Homeric bard or skald. Percy's conception of the medieval minstrel as a companion of kings and nobles, “who got their livelihood by singing verses to the harp at the houses of the great,” is a powerful, evocative image with a long history in Romantic poetry and subsequent medieval scholarship.¹² According to Percy, this order eventually became debased, transmitting and producing the inferior entertainment found in the Folio MS, as well as in the journalistic, hack efforts of ballad-mongers.

Percy's extensive reading in the metrical romances afforded him the opportunity to compare the Folio manuscript versions of romances with older witnesses. Upon comparing Sir Lambwell to Sir Launfal or The Squier to The Squire of Low Degree, for example, he realized how inferior his “mutilated, incorrect” texts were, and blamed latter-day minstrels for their “wretched readings,” which in many places were nothing more than “unintelligible nonsense” (Reliques, I, 11). Percy inferred that the ballads had met a similar, if not a worse, fate. Although Percy was also able to compare versions of ballads, he seems to have used romance transmission as a model to explain how these poems, which he believed to have been originally composed for the court, had fallen so low. Percy could therefore envision a more perfect version of ballads, especially those on “romantic subjects,” where in fact none existed, and he set about to “supplement,” “correct,” and “complete” these narratives by using the romances to restore something of their former splendor and glory. These efforts resulted in the introduction of poetry that was written by Percy, and his failure to report these alterations has consigned him to what Albert Friedman has termed “the special hell reserved for bad editors.”

The blame for Percy's editorial decision has often been put on the shoulders of William Shenstone, who collaborated with Percy on the first edition of the Reliques.¹³ As early as 1757, Percy had informed Shenstone of the Folio MS which had come into his possession. In his reply, Shenstone expressed concern that Percy would produce the letter, rather than the spirit of its contents. He advised Percy not to publish the contents of the MS, but rather to use its roughly hewn materials as a materia informis for his own poetic invention. In a sense, Shenstone counselled hermeneutic rather than editorial activity, for he recognized that Percy's success depended on his ability to mediate between a past that was something of an embarrassment and the fastidious taste of the present: the Folio MS, he argued, ought to be considered as a “hoard of gold, somewhat defac'd by Time” that could be restored “under more current Impressions.”¹⁴ Accordingly, these alterations could be compared to “a Modern Toe or Finger, which is allowably added to the best statues.”¹⁵

Percy's revisions to many of the ballads included such “toes” and “fingers” typical of the “improving” editions and ballad rifacimenti fashionable during the period: he regularized the meter, corrected and improved rhymes, reworked the diction, and straightened syntax.¹⁶ But these emendations are minor compared to the extensive interpolations and alterations introduced into ballads on “romantic subjects” in the Reliques. Sir Cauline and The Marriage of Sir Gawaine were swollen to twice their original length; The Child of Elle, a mere fragment of thirty-nine lines in the Folio MS, was amplified to 201 lines, while little of the original was left untouched. The term reliques was particularly apt for these ballads, for Percy seems to have conceived of them as mere vestiges of complete narratives, and as partial realizations of the promise inherent in his text. His headnote to Sir Cauline is instructive: “the whole appeared so far short of the perfection it seemed to deserve that the Editor was tempted to add several stanzas in the first part, and still more in the second, to connect and compleat the story in the manner which appeared to him most interesting and affecting” (Reliques, I, 61). Percy's conception of these ballads as fragmentary productions (or, as mere parts of a whole) seems to have depended upon his viewing them against a background of romance narratives, a perception which was prompted by their juxtaposition in his Folio manuscript.

In these ballads, Percy set about to reverse the process by which these works had become so threadbare, and the romances provided a ready, if not logical, source for his alterations, since he believed that the romances and ballads had been similarly composed, and that both had suffered by an oral transmission directed to a popular audience. Percy had grasped the conventional and episodic nature of romance narratives, and he applied this knowledge in his ballad restorations. As Percy read ballads that described romance commonplaces, he freely supplied plot incidents and details taken from the fuller expositions found in the romances to amplify and expand the terse, often fragmentary narrative of these ballads. In a sense, Percy composed in a manner similar to that of the medieval minstrels whom he so admired, for just as the composers and reciters of such pieces “made no scruple” in altering each other's productions, Percy felt free to change and enrich these ballads by borrowing materials from the romances.

In his restoration of these ballads, Percy appropriated elements that were originally details of other texts, in other words, parts of different wholes. In his introductions to a few ballads, Percy uncovered his method and openly avowed his large debt to romance materials. In Valentine and Ursine, the ballad which he fashioned from a couplet version of Valentine and Orson in the Folio MS, Percy acknowledged not only that he had drawn details from the romance itself, but that he had gratuitously introduced a marvellous bridge (lined with bells) described in Beues of Hampton into the poem (Reliques, III, 265). This image had come to Percy's attention when he discovered that Richard Johnson had borrowed this bridge from Beues in his sixteenth-century romance, The Seven Champions of Christendom,¹⁷ and he was so impressed with both the detail and his scholarly discovery of it in both texts (his headnote dwells on the latter) that he made use of it in this ballad. In a creative reworking of King Arthur's Death, Percy had relied upon a more congruous source, having turned to Malory for details concerning Arthur's death and the tossing of Excalibur into the water (Reliques, III, 27-8). But it is in his restoration of the ballad The Legend of King Arthur that Percy most closely approximates a modern editor, and his success in restoring this ballad testifies to his scholarly acumen. In his headnote to The Legend (Reliques, III, 39), Percy stated that he had relied upon the chronicles of Geoffrey of Monmouth and Caxton to correct corrupt forms of proper names and to transpose stanzas which were apparently misplaced. Charles Millican's discovery of the source for this ballad, an Elizabethan account of the Nine Worthies composed by Richard Lloyd, has shown that both of Percy's transpositions, as well as many of his emendations, were absolutely correct.¹⁸ Percy knew the Arthurian tradition so well that he succeeded in reconstructing the exact continuity of the original text without ever seeing it.

The fifteenth-century ballad The Marriage of Sir Gawaine (Reliques, III, 13-24) provides a particularly interesting example of Percy's method. The Marriage is a loathly lady tale in which Arthur is charged with answering the question what women want most, and Gawain must marry the hag who provides the answer. Its narrative is most similar to the late romance The Weddynge of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell.¹⁹ The unique text of the Marriage which survives in the Folio MS is indeed fragmentary since half of each folio on which the poem appears has been torn away.²⁰ The wretched physical state of this manuscript invited Percy to hermeneutic activity (see also Professor Robinson's essay, supra, pp. 193-200). Percy faced the task of bridging rather large narrative gaps, which he estimated to be nine stanzas in length, and he drew upon conventional romance episodes to replenish these lacunae.

The first few lines of the ballad describe a Christmas feast at Arthur's court at Carlisle; after the first gap, Arthur declines to fight a “bold baron” at Tarn Wadling, and is told that he must ransom himself by answering the question what it is that women want most. To get Arthur out of his court and to Tarn Wadling, Percy introduces a damsel who interrupts the feast and asks that Arthur avenge her since this bold baron has imprisoned her lover in his “bowre,” and then “misused” her. From his reading in the Folio MS, Percy was familiar with the conventional opening of a romance at the king's court, and with the interruption of the feast by one who delivers a message or a challenge: The Grene Knight and The Turke and Gowin begin in precisely this way, and The Boy and the Mantle, yet another Arthurian ballad in the MS, begins with the court in residence at Carlisle.²¹ But perhaps the closest episode is that found in the Folio MS version of Libeaus Desconus, in which Helen, a fair maiden, interrupts a feast, kneels before the king, and, according to Percy's synopsis, “comes to implore King Arthur's assistance to rescue a young princess … who is detained from her rights, and confined in prison.”²² Although the details of Libeaus do not correspond exactly, the underlying dramatic situation is similar to the one Percy introduces into the Marriage, and Percy may well have thought of Libeaus because it also tells a transformation story involving Gawain and his kin.

From his reading Percy had also concluded that Arthur's knights were characterized with certain attributes and manners: “thus Gawaine is always drawn courteous and gentle: Kay rugged and brutal: Guenever light and inconstant.”²³ Although this observation seems only too obvious now, at the time Percy had excitedly communicated his discovery to a grateful and attentive Thomas Warton. In the Marriage, Arthur is unwilling to fight the “bold baron” and is discourteous to the loathly lady, a characterization which would have been unthinkable to a reader of romances and chronicles, let alone to a reader of Spenser.²⁴ Percy set about to alter the portrayal of a cowardly and rude Arthur in the ballad. The baron becomes a giant, who now lives in a castle built on “magicke ground” that saps Arthur of his strength when he sets foot upon it. The original detail of the baron carrying “a great club upon his back” may have first suggested Percy's transformation of this character into a giant, but the idea behind this scene may well have come from The Faerie Queene, for with the changing of a few details it is reminiscent of Red-Cross's defeat by the giant Orgoglio after the knight has drunk from a spring that has sapped him of his powers. Red-Cross is then imprisoned in Orgoglio's castle, and his release is only obtained when Una encounters Prince Arthur and begs his assistance (Book I.vii-viii).

Further, in Percy's version Arthur's silence upon meeting the hag is no longer interpreted as a sign of discourtesy; instead, Percy emphasizes how thunderstruck he is by her loathsome appearance. Percy also rejects Arthur's unprompted and unceremonious offer of Gawain as a husband. In his version, Arthur agrees to whatever the hag wishes, leaving Gawain an opportunity to exhibit his “old Courtesy” when he offers himself as a bridegroom in a subsequent interpolation: “Then bespake him Sir Gawaine, / That was ever a gentle knighte: / That lothly ladye I will wed; / Therefore be merry and lighte” (MSG [Marriage of Sir Gawaine] II.21-4).

Since Percy believed the Marriage to have been Chaucer's source for the Wife of Bath's Tale, it is hardly surprising that he went to the Wife's tale for a number of scenes. For example, the ballad omits a description of Arthur's fruitless search for an answer before he meets the hag. In Percy's version, Arthur rides everywhere in search of the answer immediately after being set the question, just as the knight does in the Wife's tale (WBT [Wife of Bath's Tale,] III.919-21).²⁵ Arthur receives answers which seem to be modernizations of the various responses given in Chaucer: Percy's “riches, pompe, or state,” correspond to “richesse” and “honour”; “rayment fine and brighte” to “riche array”; “mirthe” and “flatterye” to “jolynesse” and “flaterye,” and “a jolly knighte” may well represent a censored version of “lust abedde” (MSG I.81-4; WBT 925-34). The encounter with the loathly lady also contains hints of the Wife of Bath's Tale. Percy has Arthur offer the hag whatever she wishes in return for the answer, and he, just as the knight in Chaucer, must swear to keep his promise before learning what her request will be (MSG I.109-20; WBT 1008-13). Percy's reference to the answer as a “secrette” (MSG I.115) may owe something to Chaucer's image of the hag whispering it in the knight's ear (WBT 1021).

Much of the bedroom scene after the marriage of Gawain and the loathly lady is also missing from the ballad, although it is clear that the transformation of the hag into a beautiful woman takes place before the knight yields his sovereignty to the lady, as it does in the Weddynge as well as in Gower's Tale of Florent. The original states that the lady's enchantment is the work of a wicked stepmother; Percy adds that this “spelle” could not be lifted until “a young faire courtlye knight” married her, and agreed to be ruled by her. Percy may have inferred this explanation from the events described in the ballad, with the help of the clue provided by the maistrie won at the end of the Wife of Bath's Tale; however, the interpolation is sufficiently close to Gower's conclusion to make one wonder if Percy did not know the Tale of Florent as well. Yet Percy only mentions Gower in passing, and then merely to condemn his “tedious allegories” (Reliques, III, 354). On the other hand, Warton seems to have been one of the first scholars to have noticed the similarity between the loathly lady stories of Gower and Chaucer, and Percy may have benefited from this insight.²⁶

It is possible to analyze Sir Cauline in a similar fashion. This ballad was cited by Henry Wheatley, who published what has become the standard edition of the Reliques in 1876, as Percy's “most flagrant violation of manuscript authority”; ironically, Sir Cauline was singled out for praise by Wordsworth, who judged it to be “an exquisite ballad,” and Coleridge borrowed heavily from it in Christabel.²⁷ The numerous romance commonplaces in this ballad, notably a vassal's love for a king's daughter and the deeds of valor undertaken by Cauline to win the princess, were familiar to Percy from his reading of King Horn, Guy of Warwick, The Squire of Low Degree, and two Folio romances, Sir Degree and Eglamore.

Since Percy had not postulated a source for this ballad, he freely introduced and blended scenes and images from many of these romances in his version of Sir Cauline. From Eglamore, for example, he borrowed the name Christabel, with which he christened the unnamed lady of the ballad, and perhaps he modelled his reworking of Cauline's battle with a giant on Eglamore's defeat of the giant Marrocke and his brother. Imagery from Eger and Grime, which was also collected in the Folio manuscript, seems to have been introduced in Percy's handling of the relatively uncommon Eldridge king episode, for he seems to have observed parallels between Sir Gray-Steel and the Eldridge king which have not gone unnoticed by modern editors of these works.²⁸

Yet Percy's rejection of the ending of the ballad, in which Cauline marries the princess and she bears him fifteen sons, reveals his willingness to sacrifice an authentic romance episode (confirmed by his reading in the Earl of Toulouse) if it did not cater to eighteenth-century sensibility. Having heeded Shenstone's advice, Percy is well aware that he is mediating between the past and an age that had little taste for “unadulterated antiquity.” Percy seeks to bridge this historical distance by substituting a pathetic, tragic ending in which Cauline is mortally wounded and Christabel dies from sorrow. His reworking recalls the sentimental conclusions of ballad imitations, and demonstrates just how far Percy would stray from romance materials to create an “interesting and affecting” scene.

The theme of the present volume indicates perhaps that our modern critical sensibility is now prepared to acknowledge, though perhaps not to endorse, Percy's hermeneutic enterprise in the Reliques. Percy's extensive revisions and interpolations have received kinder assessments from more recent critics, who have called attention to the audience that this method won for previously neglected poetry, to the notoriously corrupt texts of the Folio MS, and to the superior poetry found in some of Percy's versions, which had impressed Scott, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. Undoubtedly, Percy's methods, if considered from the point of view of a modern scholarly editor, are absolutely indefensible. I would argue, however, that Percy never saw himself as an “editor” of these ballads in the modern sense of the word, but rather envisioned himself as a latter-day minstrel, trying to reshape the romance ballads of the Folio MS so that they might better please his eighteenth-century audience. In doing so, Percy was following in the steps of the antiquarian scribe who had compiled the Percy Folio MS in the preceding century, for he too had revived and remade forgotten poems and songs.

Shenstone had once remarked to Percy that his “improved” copies could still rank as old barons, however modern their robes might be.²⁹ But Percy had clothed these ballads according to his understanding of medieval minstrel activity, and he had woven his texts from romance materials that were originally medieval. It was this re-creation of minstrel activity in the eighteenth century, rather than the insipid and fussy emendations and modernizations suggested by Shenstone, that won Percy such a high place in English literature and captured the imagination of the Romantic poets.

Notes

1. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 3:78.

2. Scott on Himself, ed. David Hewitt (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1981), 28.

3. Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934-50), 3:278. Despite this praise, Dr. Johnson's attitude towards Percy is not easily understood; Johnson's well-known parodies of Percy's ballad scholarship and compositions suggest a contempt for such projects. On this apparent contradiction, see Albert Friedman, The Ballad Revival (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 188-94.

4. “To correct the obvious errors of an illiterate transcriber, to supply irremediable defects, and to make sense of nonsense, are certainly essential duties of an editor of ancient poetry, provided he act with integrity and publicity; but secretly to suppress the original text, and insert his own fabrications for the sake of providing more refined entertainment for readers of taste and genius, is no proof or either judgment, candour, or integrity,” Ancient English Metrical Romances, ed. J. Ritson, rev. E. Goldsmid, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: E. and G. Goldsmid, 1884-86), 1:58. For an account of the Percy-Ritson feud, see Bertrand H. Bronson, Joseph Ritson: Scholar-at-Arms, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1938), vol. 2, chap. 8.

5. Walter Jackson Bate, “Percy's Use of His Folio-Manuscript,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 43 (1944): 337-48; Friedman, The Ballad Revival, chap. 7; Cleanth Brooks, ed., The Correspondence of Thomas Percy and William Shenstone, vol. 7 of The Percy Letters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), xv-xxiii.

6. Percy recorded the circumstances relating to this discovery in a note which appears on the inside cover of the Folio MS. The contents of the MS (including Percy's notes) have been edited by John W. Hales and Frederick J. Furnivall in Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript, 3 vols. (London: N. Trübner and Co., 1867-68); a fourth volume, Loose and Humorous Songs, was edited and published by Furnivall in 1868. For the note in question, see Hales and Furnivall, 1: lxxiv. On the date of Percy's discovery, see Bertram H. Davis, Thomas Percy (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981), 75-6.

7. “On the Ancient Metrical Romances,” in Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, ed. Henry B. Wheatley, 3 vols. (London: Swan Sonnenschein and Co., 1910), 3:339-76. Unless otherwise noted, all subsequent references to the Reliques are to Wheatley's edition.

8. “The favourable light in which Mr. Hurd and he [Warton] set the old Romances, I think will be an excellent preparative for such a collection of the old ones in metre as I think sometime or other to publish,” The Correspondence of Thomas Percy and Richard Farmer, ed. Cleanth Brooks, vol. 2 of The Percy Letters (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1946), letter dated Sept. 9, 1762, p. 9; see also The Correspondence of Thomas Percy and David Dalrymple, Lord Hailes, ed. A. F. Falconer, vol. 4 of The Percy Letters (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1954), 55-6.

   Arthur Johnston has discussed Percy's contribution to early romance scholarship in Enchanted Ground: The Study of Medieval Romance in the Eighteenth Century (London: Athlone Press, 1964), 75-99. See also Leah Dennis, “Percy's Essay ‘On the Ancient Metrical Romances,’” Publications of the Modern Language Association 49 (1934): 81-97, and E. K. A. Mackenzie, “Thomas Percy's Great Schemes,” Modern Language Review 43 (1948): 34-8.

9. The Correspondence of Thomas Percy and Thomas Warton, ed. M. G. Robinson and Leah Dennis, vol. 3 of The Percy Letters (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 2.

10. Old and Middle English Poetry (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), 260-4.

11. The relation between the ballad and medieval romance remains a vexed question; for a recent discussion, see H. O. Nygard, “Popular Ballad and Medieval Romance,” in Ballad Studies, ed. E. B. Lyle (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1976), 1-19.

12. Percy's famous views on the subject, which gave rise to considerable debate about the status of the medieval English minstrel, can be found in “An Essay on the Ancient Minstrels in England,” Reliques, 1:345-430; Percy was willing to admit, however, that some of the longer romances may have been originally composed in writing (1:404-5).

13. Irving L. Churchill, “William Shenstone's Share in the Preparation of Percy's Reliques,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 51 (1936): 960-74; Leah Dennis, “Thomas Percy, Antiquarian vs. Man of Taste,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 57 (1942): 140-54; and Cleanth Brooks's introduction to the Percy-Shenstone Correspondence.

14. Percy-Shenstone Correspondence, letter dated Nov. 24, 1757, 3-4.

15. Ibid., 73.

16. For a detailed account of these emendations, see Bate, 337-48; also Eileen Mackenzie, “Thomas Percy and Ballad ‘Correctness,’” Review of English Studies 21 (1945): 58-60, and Friedman, 204ff.

17. Percy-Warton Correspondence, 38-42; Percy's bridge, in fact, has one hundred bells like Johnson's, not sixty as in Beues.

18. Charles Millican, “The Original of the Ballad ‘Kinge: Arthurs Death’ in the Percy Folio MS.,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 46 (1931): 1020-24.

19. Laura Sumner, in her edition of The Weddynge, has argued that both works derive from the same source: see Smith College Studies in Modern Languages, vol. 5, no. 4. (Northampton, Mass., 1924): xx-xxvi.

20. For the Folio MS version of the Marriage, see Hales and Furnivall, 1:103-18; in response to Ritson's attacks, Percy produced a faithful transcription of the MS version in the fourth edition of the Reliques (published in 1794, and nominally edited by Percy's nephew) to demonstrate the extreme corruption of his MS texts.

21. Hales and Furnivall, 1:90-2; 2:58-62; 2:304-5; The Marriage follows The Turke and Gowin in the Folio MS.

22. Hales and Furnivall, 2:419-23, lines 109-77.

23. Percy-Warton Correspondence, 3.

24. In March, 1764, Evan Evans, an expert in Welsh poetry, had sent, at Percy's request, notes on the Marriage, in which he observed that “we never read of King Arthur's being ever worsted in any of his battles or single combats in any of our romances” (The Correspondence of Thomas Percy and Evan Evans, ed. Aneirin Lewis, vol. 5 of The Percy Letters [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957], 70).

25. All references to Chaucer's poetry from The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1957).

26. Thomas Warton, The History of English Poetry, ed. W. Carew Hazlitt, 4 vols. (London: Reeves and Turner, 1871), 3:32.

27. On Coleridge's borrowings, see Donald Reuel Tuttle, “Christabel Sources in Percy's Reliques and the Gothic Romances,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 53 (1938): 445-74.

28. See, for example, Eger and Grime, ed. James Ralston Caldwell (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1933), 58-60; The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, ed. F. J. Child (1882-98; rpt., New York: The Folklore Press, 1957), 2:56-7.

29. Percy-Shenstone Correspondence, 137.