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...