SOURCE: “A Reappraisal of Percy's Editing,” in Folk Music Journal, Vol. 5, No. 2, 1986, pp. 202-14.

In the following essay, Knapman discusses the critical evaluation, by both contemporaries and twentieth-century scholars, of Percy's editing practices in the Reliques.

In 1765, the year when George III's Stamp Act started the great ‘No Taxation without Representation’ row with the American Colonies, Bishop Percy published a heavily edited and annotated anthology entitled Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.¹ The collection, although a rich source of folk texts, has never been popular with folklorists and Percy's significance has only been grudgingly acknowledged. When writing of the Reliques, critics have either drawn attention to the influence the collection exerted on the Romantic Poets, or alternatively, and this is particularly true of folk scholars, they have bewailed Percy's editorial methods with vehement abuse. H. B. Wheatley complained of Percy's ‘flagrant manipulation of his sources’² and Hales and Furnivall...