The Arthurian Texts of the Percy Folio

Listen,  lords  great  and  small
What  adventures  did  befall
In  England,  where  hath  beene
Of  knights  that  held  the  round  table
Which  were  doughty  and  profittable,
Of  kempys  cruell  and  keene.
[The Turke and Gowin]

THE ARTHURIAN TEXTS OF THE PERCY FOLIO edited by John Withrington, first published as an expensive hardback edition (£125) in 2023, has just been published (November 2025) by Liverpool University Press as a new paperback edition  at a more affordable price of £29.99.*

When visiting his friend Humphrey Pitt at Shifnal, Shropshire, the 18th-century Anglican clergyman and antiquarian Bishop Thomas Percy found an old manuscript on the floor from which Pitt's maid had been pulling out pages to light fires. Percy had the manuscript bound but the bookbinder carelessly trimmed the edges of the leaves, losing the first or last lines on many pages. Percy caused additional damage to the manuscript by writing notes and comments on the pages making his own corrections and revisions and even removed some of the pages himself after binding.

The manuscript today known as the 'Percy Folio' (British Library, Additional MS. 27879) was originally compiled between 1640 and 1660, and formed the basis of a huge collection of ballads and popular songs collected by Percy that he published in 1765 over three volumes with the full title "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: Consisting of Heroic Ballads, Songs, and other Pieces of our earlier Poets (Chiefly of the Lyric Kind) Together with some few of Later Date."

Percy's work is more commonly known by the shorter title 'The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry' or simply as 'Percy's Reliques' and considered "one of the founding texts of English literature, an epoch-making collection of historical and lyrical ballads that defined the canon of popular poetry. It dramatically influenced Romanticism and the writing of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Walter Scott, and even Lewis Carroll." [Oxford Dictionary]

The Percy Folio contains eleven Arthurian texts all of which are published as critical editions with transcriptions taken directly from BL MS Add. 27879 in Withrington's 'The Arthurian Texts of the Percy Folio':

King Arthur and King Cornwall,
Sir Lancelot of Dulake,
The Turke & Gowin,
The Marriage of Sir Gawaine,
Sire Lambewell,
Merline,
Kinge Arthurs Death,
The Grene Knyght,
Boy and Mantle,
Libius Disconius,
Carle off Carlile.

The Arthurian Texts of the Percy Folio
Edited by John Withrington
Published by Liverpool University Press*
ISBN:9781836245230 (Paperback), 388 pages
Contributors: John Withrington, Gillian Rogers, Elizabeth Darovic, Maldwyn Mills, Raluca Radulescu, Diane Speed, Marion Trudgill and Elizabeth Williams.

*at the time of posting the publisher (LUP) is currently offering a 20% discount*

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