Thomas Percy

Thomas Percy (1729-1811) was an English clergyman, antiquary and poet, bishop of Dromore in Ireland from 1782. His name rests on a folio manuscript of ballads he rescued from a Shropshire house, where it was being torn up to light fires. From it, and from other sources, he compiled Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, published in three volumes in 1765: old ballads, songs and romances, printed with his own emendations. The book gave English readers back a popular poetry they had stopped reading, and its influence on Scott, Wordsworth and Coleridge, and on German Romanticism through Herder, was out of all proportion to its scholarship, which later editors judged severely.