Thomas Percy | Biography

Thomas Percy was well known during his lifetime as a pioneer scholar, a friend and clubmate of Samuel Johnson, and a dignitary of the church. Today he is remembered for the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), a three-volume collection that achieved a new prominence for the popular ballads of earlier times and inspired many of the Romantic poets. Percy's Reliques became a household book, and Percy himself attained an eminence reserved for only the most exceptional scholars.

Percy's Shropshire beginnings were modest but not altogether humble. A great-grandfather was the brother of the poet John Cleveland, and a great-great-grandfather had served as mayor of Worcester. His mother was Jane Nott, and his father was Arthur Lowe Piercy, a wholesale grocer, maltster, and tobacconist whose variable fortunes twice won him election as one of Bridgnorth's two chief magistrates and lords of the manor, and in between plunged him to the...
(read more)