Sources of Poetry

The purported basis of the work was the manuscript which became known as the Percy Folio. Percy found the folio in the house of his friend Humphrey Pitt. It was on the floor and Pitt's maid had been using the leaves to light fires. Once rescued, Percy would use forty-five of the ballads in the folio for his book despite claiming the bulk of it came from this folio. Other sources were the Pepys Library of broadside ballads collected bySamuel Pepys and Collection of Old Ballads published in 1723, possibly by Ambrose Philips. Bishop Percy was encouraged to publish the work by his friends Samuel Johnson and William Shenstone who also found and contributed ballads.

Percy did not treat the folio nor the work in them with scrupulous care. He wrote his own notes on the folio pages, emended the rhymes and even pulled pages out of the document. He was criticised for these actions even at the time, most notably by Joseph Ritson a fellow antiquary. The folio he worked from seems to have been written by a single copyist and errors such as pan and wale for wan and pale needed correcting.